Retouching Reality
Not too long ago, we noticed that a Flickr member digitally touched up a photo of Dutch Crown Princess Juliana holding her infant daughter Beatrix, from the Nationaal Archeif on the Flickr Commons. The retouched photo pictures the former Dutch monarch with "airbrushed" skin of a more even tone. Of course, there is nothing novel about the manipulation of photographs—since the beginning of the medium photographers have used chemicals, light, pens, and airbrushes to alter photographic negatives and prints. What has changed is the ease with which people can manipulate photographs. In the past, the ability to manipulate photographs was mainly in the hands of the wealthy and powerful: Stalin could erase politicians from photographs when they fell out of favor; advertisers could airbrush the legs of their hosiery models; and large film studios could create fantastical sets for the newest sci-fi film. However, the proliferation and availability of programs like Photoshop have democratized the ability to retouch photographs.
The consequences of this leave me feeling ambivalent. On the one hand, I was happy on a recent occasion to be able to help a family friend by retouching a photograph of a loved one's grave that was marred by the presence of liquor bottles. They now live in the US, far away from their homeland and the cemetery, and Photoshopping the photo for them brought a lot of comfort. On the other hand, what do we lose and what do future generations lose by erasing history, and in this case, imperfections, out of a picture? It may be naïve nostalgia on my own part, but as my colleague Effie pointed out, there is something earnest and comforting about that original untouched photo of a Queen with not-so-perfect skin.
Comments (7) – Leave a comment
The debate about reality vs. aesthetics of photo has long been argued and will no doubt continue to be. Both versions of the photo continue to exist and have a purpose... but as an artist, I manipulate photos to bring out an inner beauty that is clarified by the removal of distractions. Another point is that the camera is a machine and only able to capture one moment in time, mechanically and without the higher processes of the human brain. The light, the shadow, the hard reality limited to 2 dimensions of what the machine records is not necessarily what our ever processing brains perceive, remember, or even register as seeing. I believe that photo retouching can simply create an image that is more close to what our brain perceives as it calculates the momentary changes in light and the three dimensional shape...and perhaps even their emotional connection or response to the subject.I do not claim that is anything more that what is to own eye and no one elses. This photo, aesthetically has beautiful composition and lines and to my eye, I could see that ethereal theme of mother and child enhanced even more with some photo retouching. I didn't retouch this photo for any other reason but because it was interesting for me to work on it and see the results. I thought I would share it for whoever else found some value in it.
As a professional photographer I can relate to this article. The digital revolution does allow us to easily manipulate images to suit our needs.
Eileen-
Thank you for your comments! As I noted in my post, I certainly have ambivalent feelings about photo retouching, and it's a difficult subject to talk about in black and white terms. As you say both versions of the photo continue to serve a purpose.
There are two things that make your retouching work different than much of the "airbrush" work that occurs out there: 1) you make the original photo clear and accessible and 2) you are also clear that you're an artist, enhancing a particular "theme" or feeling in a photograph. While I don't know that I agree with your notion that photo retouching makes an image closer "to what our brain perceives as it calculates the momentary changes . . .," I certainly respect your artistry, and know that it brings a lot of your fans on Flickr joy.
Thank you for sharing your photo with us, which among other things, is valuable in its ability to be thought-provoking. Your photo made me think, which to me, is the most valuable and important thing photography can offer up.
We, as photographers, have been manipulating images long before the digital age, to enhance, clean up, retouch, and 'alter' reality even further than the mechanical eye that captures the moment. Photography in and of itself is not reality, so this natural evolution of processing and retouching is just an additional modification to a concept of a photographer. I agree with you Catherine, there is a fine line, and there are also different purposes for different reasons, but we as a society idealize the human form and will always manipulate skin discontinuity with a graphics tablet or with makeup.
To play devil's advocate to myself, I thought I'd share this link to a post on the blog Muse-ings: http://photo-muse.blogspot.com/2009/10/warning-this-models-hips-were-made.html.
The author, Tim Atherton, argues that all digital manipulation of photographs is good because it makes even more clear the fact that all photographs are full of fiction (and allows us to stop spending energy arguing that this is the case). Food for thought...
I photoshop all my pictures... i crop them... re-angle them... change the contrast... lightness/ darkness... but i never distort a picture/ add things to a picture/ cut or erase things from a picture... to me, photograph is art, and we can do whatever we want to make it look good... nothing extreme. But it must reflect the reality at the end.
This is cool in a way, scary in a another. The problem is that after seeing photoshopped pictures for years - especially celebritiy pics, you start to believe that people with flawless skin exist. This makes real people with real, human ‘flaws’ appear to look bad. I know this type of photo retouching has been going on since way before Photoshop, but it seems to create an ideal that doesn’t exist. I guess the argument could be made that retouching pictures is art. I have mixed feelings about it.
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