Re: truth and public sentiment

[Howard <howard.leigh@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bob Talbot wrote:

How can a camera be digital if it doesn't have fingers?
    

Un(cle)Bob


Digital photography has stuck 10 fingers up to the concept of an
honest image. With digital the concepts of truth and lie have no
meaning as at last there is no difference, no trace ...

No artist's statement, however detailed, however long winded, can ever
remove that doubt.  But we live in a changing world.  Honesty is no
longer a virtue, nor dishonesty a sin.  Neither in business nor in
politics, nor in photography.  We are lied to on a daily basis, yet,
even when the lies are uncovered, we just shrug and accept that it
must have been for our own good.  That the perpetrators are somehow
stronger for their ability to have fooled us so well. That the way to
get on is to lie with them ...

What matters is winning.  If you can't win fairly, change the rules.

Q
  

Surely the traditional image has always been capable of a lie. Multiple printing, selective cropping, editorial choice of one deceptive image from several telling a different story, altering the actual prints obtained from the same negative, even altering the negative - it's all been done before. And so well that often no-one would ever know.
And since you or I never would be able to see the negatives, those "traces" of so-called reality, it's little different in my mind to altering a digital image.
 
I try to avoid changing anything apart from minor changes to colour balance and contrast, but today I had to "replace" a bride's head in one image (overall the better, but she had shut her eyes!) with one from another image in which she was smiling...
And in the whole group photo, I had to paste myself in from a different file - I was unable to use the self-timer!

Yet the traces remain, because, like negatives I never work on the original digital file...But no-one will see them apart from me...


Howard