Photographic Manipulation And The Internet Wednesday December 6, 2006
About two years ago, David Hockney was being interviewed and quoted in the media for his views on photography. It sucks, he said, because in the digital age it can’t be trusted since much of it is manipulated. It’s lost all integrity. Except this was nonsense: it’s a controversy that’s existed for decades, Hockney is no photography expert, and there was no reason to emphasise what he said. I read one article where a journalist noted that Hockney talked about it immediately and extensively, although it was peripheral to the subject of the interview. I think he’d just made some new paintings.
People have manipulated photography from a very early age; its workflow allows this at several stages. The news and documentary genre has occasionally encountered controversial work where meaning has been deliberately and dramatically changed, but even Cartier-Bresson did this. In some of his political photographs, the ‘decisive moment’ was a manipulated construct, a captured instant unrepresentative of the facts of a situation.
Man Ray is perhaps one of the more famous examples for this subject, where his solarised pictures were presented to the world as surrealist art. Take some photographic paper, place some cutlery and assorted objects onto it and, in a darkroom, flash a light onto it as briefly as you can. The result is aesthetically more akin to graphic design than photography as it’s normally understood. But this process is, nonetheless, firmly located within the culture of photography. Hockney’s remarks were pretty much irrelevant, except for the observation that digital workflow increases the power, ease and likelihood of manipulation. It’s now easily and infinitely malleable. Some people do it, some people don’t; many photographers work much as they always have, using Photoshop power to make fine adjustments to colour, tone and contrast, only insofar as they always did with a darkroom. I myself fall into that category.
But this is not the only or principal concern in the digital era. Internet presentation magnifies the situation even more, along a different trajectory: in this convergence of shutter-click, pixel, and hyper-text transfer protocol, you find that people are practising photography according to uniquely digital parameters, rather than old-school aesthetics – and sometimes don’t know they are doing this. The print aesthetic is different; a VDU is a light emitter rather than a light reflector, benefiting from a vibrancy and hypnotic appeal you don’t get from a halide print. A colleague recently posted an image on the internet for public criticism, where it initially appeared as perfectly acceptable. However as other colleagues noted, it was so dark and mostly-black, it was of no possible use for the print medium. It’s an easy mistake; I’ve done it myself. What looks great on a screen is dull and worthless on paper. There is thus a ‘graphic’ kind of photography, internet-style, more consistent with Man Ray than Ansel Adams or Robert Frank. It looks effective on a monitor, but not if it were translated onto paper.
The medium is, in addition to being the McLuhan-esque message, potentially a problem. Photography gets levered into internet parameters, that paradoxically both expand it and limit it. It’s an astonishing medium, let’s not forget that, offering a worldwide 24/7 presentation for anyone who builds a web site. But with millions of photographs online, all competing for attention, this inevitably effects the work people produce – certainly, when it is undertaken within the culture of cyberspace, rather than old-school understanding. I once read a photoblog comment, where a person stated their favourite photographer was XYZ, who is a well-known photoblogger – one of the most famous – whose work is distinctly unexceptional, even slightly boring. His fame derives, in my opinion, from the social currency of the internet and his well presented web site, not from the impact of the photography as such.
Then there’s the matter of attention span and presentation. At the time of writing this article, my web site is constructed around the more old-school model of a column rather than a blog. Blogs have a front page where you read multiple paragraph-excerpts, taking you into full-length articles not immediately visible. Why?
– because it’s consistent with the psychology of internet usage.
Because you have to be short.
Snappy.
Brief.
People don’t have the time (apparently) or inclination to slowly peruse, leisurely savour, or reflectively engage with more considered, sustained, elaborate and sophisticated writing. This is partly technological, and the fact that writing is not well suited to a monitor. I admit, I myself find it unappealing and rarely do it; confront me with a few thousand lines of text, pepper it with complex constructions and learned abstraction, and I will surf towards a graphic comic, or a photoblog image, which is more immediate and less visually demanding. Which is partly why, incidentally, I like photoblogs; I once used to write a text-blog, but got tired of pixel-based text.
Internet culture will affect photography, because the internet form is so substantial, impacting on its wider culture. Hence the example of the photoblog comment: his favourite photographer was XYZ, whose work would not present very well in a gallery or book; it relies on beautiful web graphics and VDU illumination. And, further, both he and other online photographers are impeded by short attention span requiring, if possible, the use of arresting and high-impact images. The internet is characteristically interactive, point-and-click driven, which is not conducive to a slower appreciation of more simple and meditative photography. The result, when this applies, is very unsatisfying; it leans towards a dumbing-down of the craft, with nothing to savour or spend time with. It has no depth. You do not re-visit web site archives, the way you re-visit and enjoy a beautiful photography book. I have a list of about thirty favourite sites that I used to view almost every day. I still do on occasion open them up in Firefox, and traverse my mouse across the different tabs. But as with my decreased interest in text blogs, I now do this less. Even with the notable images, the ones I enjoyed and still find memorable, I feel little attraction to revisit them – unlike the work of Cartier-Bresson, or Ansel Adams, whose work I constantly return to as a nourishing and inspiring experience.
It seems the glow of VDU-driven work needs constantly replacing with another new image, to satisfy the experience. It’s consumerist, rather than reflective. Internet photography is qualitatively, subtly, but in its overall effect substantially different from its old-school predecessor. ‘Quiet’ images lack the impact of more dramatic pictures, because they require an investment of more than a few seconds of time.
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