The Truth About Reality

The school where I teach digital photography urges its instructors to remind our students that “Photoshop is not a verb.” I do, and everyone always laughs and then we talk about what the point of the statement is, about how important it still is to learn lighting and exposure and composition and cropping images in the camera and blah, blah, blah. In order to further encourage them to learn the skills necessary to "get it right in the camera" I ask them to pretend, for a little while at least, that it’s 1989 and Photoshop is not only not a verb, it’s not even a word because it hasn’t been invented yet. That goes over like a lead balloon.

Writing in the December 1, 2007 online edition of Newsweek, Peter Plagens posed a question that I’ve been asking myself a lot lately— “Is Photography Dead?” He goes on for several pages about how, on the surface at least, photography appears to be alive and kicking, maybe even too much so. “There are hordes of photographers out there”, he writes, “working with back-to-basics pinhole cameras and pixeled images measured in gigabytes, with street photography taken by cell phones and massive photo ‘shoots’ whose crews, complexity and expense resemble those of movie sets.” Plagens believes, however, that digital technology has led many of these photographers into a world of make-believe, one where “reality” is often defined by their fictive imaginations powered by Photoshop skills instead of their truthful observations. In his view, photographers are moving away from their traditional role as "truth-bearers" toward a postmodernist sensibility fueled by easy and popular access to digital cameras and software. He sees it as nothing less than struggle for photography’s very soul.

And so do I, kind of. But I’m thinking a little more, I suppose you might say, cautiously optimistic than Mr. Plagens. I actually think that a more pertinent question to ask ourselves is “Is Digital Photography Alive?”, and my answer to that is "Of Course It Is, If You Want It To Be." To understand where I’m going with this, you have to consider what one self-help cult I got roped into joining by an ex-girlfriend used to like to demand of its adherents back in the 1980’s. You have to understand and accept “The Truth About Reality”.

Photography has never been about “truth” or “reality”, and anyone who thinks that it has been probably sees the film-versus-digital debate in far more starkly divided terms than I do. Photographers are visual editors. That means that all photography is editorial (opinion-based) in nature for many reasons, the simplest of which is the existence of the camera’s viewfinder. In use, that innocuous little square or rectangular window is anything but ambivalent and all-inclusive, and civilization has been manipulated by it since the first photographer tried to figure out just what exactly to point the contraption it was attached to at. Using it to frame the world in combination with our all-too-human proclivities toward empathy, revulsion, and awe results in not the photograph itself stating “Here is the truth”, but rather the photographer exclaiming “Here is the truth I saw”.

In general, photographers (unlike painters, for instance) don't start with a blank canvas when composing our images. We're forced to bring order to THE ENTIRE WORLD by using the viewfinder to exclude everything that doesn’t belong. We edit, even the purest purists among us, every time we choose to point the camera HERE instead of THERE. By doing so we are eliminating options and manipulating our images in a way designed to elicit a particular response. Photographic composition is a wonderful puzzle-palace of tension driven by a constant subjective analysis of what to include and what to exclude, always shooting for what Edward Weston described as "the strongest way of seeing. But make no mistake about it. Whether editing in the camera, in the darkroom, or in Photoshop, we have always manipulatied not only our images, but our viewers. The rightness or wrongness of that really only comes down to a matter of degree.

The temptations offered to us by digital photography can be either inclusive or exclusive to the point of becoming occlusive. If we're not careful, we wind up spending far too much time thinking about way too many options, and in my opinion, too much of it after the fact. Henri Cartier-Bresson once said something along these lines: “Photography doesn’t take brains. It takes sensitivity, a finger and two legs.” These days, photography does take brains, and it requires a lot of thinking. Unfortunately, the complexity of the process usually means that we’re thinking when we should be feeling, witnessing and reacting instead. As a result of that we often wind up “Photoshopping” the living daylights out of what should have been a more clearly perceived image in the first place. When asked by a student “how do I get rid of the telephone pole growing out of the top of this guy’s head?” my answer used to be “pay more attention to the visual relationships between EVERYTHING in the viewfinder next time, that’s how.” Nowadays, I still say that, but then I have to go ahead and show them how to get rid of it anyway. It sometimes seems as if the perception of photography in 2007 has more to do with the Clone Stamp and Patch tools than it does with learning how to see, think and feel clearly with a camera. It's why I think we should be asking ourselves not whether photography is dead, but whether digital photography is alive. Being alive, even when practiced diligently, is an exercise in unpredictability, intuition and faith. For me and what I do, photography is just like that and it's why I love it. It's alive and well and always will be, regardless of whether I use a digital camera or not. But like so much else in our world today, I see it being over thought and overdone by so many people, and when something is overdone, the way to correct it is to apply restraint. Unfortunately, restraint isn’t available as a Photoshop plug-in, at least not in the current release.

Plagens quotes photographer Lisette Model as saying “Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest.” She said a mouthful there, especially as it relates to photography in the twenty-first century. But I think Jerry Uelsmann’s perspective is equally valid here. A true visionary, if anyone should be pissed off at how Photoshop and digital technology have transformed the practice of photography it should be him. Uelsmann creates incredibly realized, impossibly stitched-together dreamscapes with traditional film and chemical photography, and has been doing so for the better part of four decades. He uses a series of enlargers in his darkroom to record and blend portions of multiple negatives onto a single sheet of photographic paper. The result is a composite masterpiece that can take days to make perfectly (like the one at the top of this post), but that could be made so much more easily, precisely and repeatably by anyone with a computer and a modest knowledge of Photoshop. When asked about this by John Paul Caponigro in 1997, Uelsmann was surprisingly upbeat.

“I certainly don't feel threatened by the computer. It's a tool. It's another way of making marks…I figured out pretty early, even in the darkroom, having too many options is counter productive to the creative process. The computer is the king of too many options.”

And maybe that's the point of all this. Too many options may be just that, too many options. Truth and reality, while never clear or absolute, can be snugged up pretty close to by eliminating unnecessary options.