Do Photographs Depict Reality?
True or False — The Camera Does Not Lie.
Reece Beckett published a piece the other day titled The Greatest Artist is the Camera, in which he makes the case that…
…film and photography have altered our perceptions of history, of realism, of accuracy, etc.
I think Reece is right, on the whole, but I can’t completely agree with all of his assertions.
First, Reece and I come from different perspectives; he is a filmmaker, a cinematographer; I am strictly a stills photographer. My one mandatory semester of cine in school was agony for me. Every one of my digital cameras is/was video capable; wherever possible, I have repurposed the video button for something “useful” — to me.
If I am interpreting Reece correctly, he takes a well-supported position that photography was a game-changer from the get-go, which I think is true, but that photography represents reality, as opposed to paintings and sketches that the artist inevitably influences. This is where we disagree.
I have long asserted that the camera does not represent reality, if for no other reason than it has a frame.
Cine at least can pan around, take in more of the literal frame of reference, the peripheral scene. When we physically view a scene, we have a horizontal arc of vision of roughly 200–210°, but we see sharply only the central 50–60°. The rest of the arc is called the peripheral vision, but it is blurry and blurrier the further away it is from the acute central vision (assuming corrected for 20/20). That is why so-called “normal” focal lengths for any camera format have an angle of view around 50°; “normal” lenses “see” about what the human eye sees sharply in the center.
What most lenses cannot “see” is the periphery, the blurry part. When you look around, your central vision tracks like a follow-spot, sharp in the center wherever you look. Your eye refocuses wherever your vision alights, but you are also situationally aware out to about 100° on each side. If someone out of your central arc of vision throws a football at you, you are aware of it in the “corner of your eye,” before shifting your gaze to focus on and catch it.
The camera generally has little to no peripheral vision. There are wide-angle lenses with a greater than “normal” angle of view. Even some fisheye lenses can “see behind” themselves, an angle of view on the order of 220°, but they do not “see” as the human eye does.
Generally, any camera has a lens with an angle of view that projects a circle of focused light onto a film or sensor that is usually a rectangle. That is the frame, and because it is there, the photographer can consciously or unconsciously frame out whatever s/he wishes, which can profoundly affect the picture's message.
When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts. — Garry Winogrand.
This triptych has been on the internet for years. My interpretation is that the central version is the “accurate” one: American soldiers giving water to a wounded Iraqi during one of our incursions into Iraq.
The water seems obvious, and the rifle suggests that this man is a prisoner, so, to maintain control, a soldier points it at him.
What’s interesting are the two crops — reframing the situation.
On the left, all we see is the Iraqi soldier being threatened with instant death by the soldier with the weapon. The humanitarian gesture of giving water to a wounded prisoner has been cropped or “framed out.”
On the right, the threat has been framed out and we can see only the brave, kind American GI giving water to a wounded enemy.
Either crop profoundly changes the meaning and our interpretation of what is really happening. I also assert that the central image may not tell the whole truth since it has a frame that excludes the periphery. There could be anything happening out of frame, but out of sight is out of mind.
The point is, framing matters. What is framed in may be less revealing than what is framed out, and the newspicture photographer has but a split second to decide.
Josef Stalin governed the Soviet Union from 1924 until he died in 1953. He was the epitome of brutal ruthlessness. He needed little to no reason to “disappear” anyone who teed him off, such as the hapless fellow in the first picture. Not only would the person never be seen again, but he would be erased from all photographs. Stalin had excellent retouchers and airbrushers who could do a seamless job of it for the period.
Reece also asserts, A painting cannot really be edited. Film can. Photography can, to an extent — especially in the modern era in which you just open your Photos app and can turn an image to black and white, alter the brightness, edit the saturation, etc. but film is the primary art for editing. Editing is film language, effectively. Without it, film is reduced to being a moving painting, which is still important but film unlocks the ability to go so much further with the edit.
I think this statement is almost entirely inaccurate. A painter edits a painting on the fly as the painter chooses what to put in, what to leave out, and for that matter, the entire placement of the frame. S/he can change the color on the spot, paint in a shrub where none is in reality, add a picket fence, a couple of deer — the controversial Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light, so far as I know created his scenes entirely in his mind. He wasn’t out there in the sun and rain — he was in his comfortable studio painting as it occurred to him.
As a still photographer but not a photojournalist or forensic photographer, I edit, clone out distractions all the time. Newspicture photographers are strictly forbidden from doing exactly that, and some have been fired and banned from agencies when caught.
I was playing with a battered and scratched penny. I wanted it isolated from the background, a wadded bit of cloth, so I adhered the penny to the clip of a “third hand” tool. I knew when I did it that I was going to have to remove the support, which is not at all difficult if you know how.
For (too) many years, I contented myself with all-in-one point-and-shoots and shot JPEGs. Tiny sensors mean depth-of-field from here to eternity, as in the picture on the right. Years of developing Photoshop skills allowed me to faux-bokeh that too-sharp-too-bright background to be less distracting from my subjects. When I do something this radical, I disclose it so folks don’t get mad.
Above my excuse was that I had a brand new camera and lens and couldn't wait to use it, even though the weather was überbleak, dead overcast, zero character, yet still, I flung myself prone in the hostas because. I’ve always disclosed that I added the sky the old-fashioned way (before Photoshop introduced its fabulous sky replacement tool). The sky is mine, photographed specifically for the purpose at another time. If you compare the two closely, you can see that several stanchions, ropes, and signs were also cloned out — distractions.
So, is it a lie? Is it even a photograph? What if I had painted it there, prostrate in the hostas (I am surprised I got up); would I have painted the sky the way I wanted instead of stark white reality? Would I have carefully included the existing ropes and stanchions? Why? They are unimportant and add nothing to the picture, which is neither evidence nor journalism, so why paint them in, and why not remove them from a photograph?
Finally, there are the true composites, pictures or illustrations made up of multiple images. It used to be called “pasteup” and was a legitimate tool of commercial photographers. I was trained in and good at it.
I don’t even know why I took this shot at Halloween. Maybe I was clearing my camera how waist gunners on B17s would clear their .50 calibers to be sure they worked before leaving the ground. I dud-oh, but there it was and should have been binned on upload. For some reason not well understood, I kept it.
I really cannot explain where this idea came from, but I got it and managed to realize it. My late beloved loved a painting of a child with a dog sitting on a pier looking out to sea. The title was, “Of Course I’ll Take You With Me When I Go.” Maybe that was what resonated. I see everything that is wrong with this slightly silly Fantasiestück, but I like it. It’s not a lie; it’s a story.
Thanks for reading. Polite discussion encouraged.
