The ethics of Photoshop.

Shortly after I got my digital camera I took the greatest photo I had ever taken in my entire life. I've since learned that I always feel this about the most recent photo I've taken. But, this one was perfect. The buildings formed a cascading repeating pattern, the uniform colours lent themselves to my B&W composition sensibilities, and most importantly it was interesting. I ran home and transferred it from the camera to the computer to discover that while I was setting up the photo a man had walked into the middle of the composition and bent over, displaying his ass in the middle of my heavenly work.

In the version presented to you above, faithful reader, this offense is undetectable. Why? Because I deleted him. In a moment of weakness I loaded Photoshop and, with a trembling hand, pixel by pixel, wiped this smudge of humanity from existence. I felt terrible, but was in awe. I showed my manipulation to everyone I knew, both as a confession and as a display my prowess. I was a firm believer that Photoshop was the tool of the devil and was made to spread lies. But here it had done something useful, and no one got hurt. This got me and my friend Lionel talking about the ethics of Photoshop and the manipulation of photographs in general.

Photoshop rightly has a bad rap because it can used to do terrible things. Aside from overeager people butchershopping colours and contrast, flat out lying is the most noteworthy. In a world that has the most perfect tool to communicate its wonders, people assume that everything is photoshopped. They have been lied to so many times, why believe? Why risk being duped by the internet? We know there's no greater humiliation.

But Photoshop can be used properly as a tool of the artist to convey their truths. They have to maintain the integrity of their image, but it's very hard to know where the boundary of that integrity lies. Especially concerning journalistic photography. I now alter every photo I take. It is my darkroom; I adjust the colours and contrast such that they reflect the image I actually perceived. People have this strange idea that what is captured on the lens is the "truth", when in reality the sensor or film captures light from a spectrum different from that of the human eye, with an intensity response different than the human eye. The image must be processed to attain the truth.

Furthermore, the camera captures objects that we don't perceive. The human mind is a wonder at gathering local bits of information and assembling them into a coherent whole. But it is selective in what is chooses to make this image. This is a lesson that my dad would consistently remind me of, and is the bane of most people who take photographs. They see a subject, take the picture, only to find later that their subject is overshadowed by all this other junk. The skill of a photographer lies in rendering the subject in such a way that the junk around it vanishes, and we are left with only the elements that make the composition.

With such powerful post-processing we can easily remove unwanted elements to render the subject the way we want. An unscrupulous individual with almost no training can alter an image for their own means. It is necessary to invoke words such as integrity and honour to ensure we don't go too far. Artisitic and journalistic integrity is not new, but we do need to be reminded of it. We have to look no further than the cover of Time Magazine to find abuses of Photoshop's ubiquitous clone tool, so I will spare you and show you processing with integrity. The example is the photo Migrant Mother by Dorothy Lange and has nothing to do with Photoshop. People were cropping, dodging, burning, and filtering since the invention of photography.

This is probably the most recognizable depression era photo. The thumb on her left hand, which is resting on the pole in the foreground, has been removed. This is clearly done for aesthetic purposes, to bring the subject forward, rather than have people staring at a thumb. Does it damage the photo's credibility? No. It allows us to feel what Dorothy wanted us to feel, which is likely what she felt taking the picture.

Modern examples exist, but are hard to detect because the technology and the care taken to alter them. As proof, faithful reader, I've included below a gif illustrating my shameful deletion. The artist is not trying to deceive you by hiding some element of the photo, they are removing something they actually do not perceive should be there, thus rendering the truth of their experience. In art and journalism this is the point.

An attempt to tell the truth can lead to lies. A journalist attending the protests in Iran feels the magnitude of the crowd around them, only to go home a discover their pictures don't capture this, so they add some more people. A war photographer in Beirut feels the smoke for the burning building searing their lungs with every breath, but when they get home the smoke doesn't look that thick, so they add some more. They have manipulated the image to tell the truth of their experience. Unfortunately, they are poor photographers that failed to capture their experience. They have no integrity because they have betrayed the most fundamental aspect of their art form---capturing. Photography is capturing, it is nothing else.

As the froth and spittle from this tirade dries on the corners of my mouth, it seems that my arguments distil into a simple moral rule: it is OK to remove elements of a photograph, but not OK to add them. If it were this simple we still wouldn't be dwelling over 1984. But it's a start.