Participants' Reports
Photography and Manipulation
I want to speak to you about the manipulation that surrounds us every day, and specifically about the methods which exist to manipulate the observers eye. This is most observed in photography.
In newspapers, magazines, Internet, TV and so on… everywhere where we are forced to use our eyes as the only possibility to get information, we are manipulated. There are a lot of reasons to manipulate the observer. Mostly for political or economic reasons, every time somebody wants people to think in a certain way.
There are different ways to manipulate. Very simple and fast methods like lighting, point of view, frame and moment and also very complicated methods like arrangement of whole situations, cropping, movement of film camera to lead the observers eye through an entire situation.
I want to go through different methods and give you some examples of very different kinds of manipulation which show that manipulation has existed even before the development of Photoshop, that there is manipulation from the first beginning of photography.
The technical part is so simple. In principle a camera is nothing else than a box with a hole in it to let in the light. And so easy is it to manipulate photography.
Let us go to the beginning of photography about 150 years ago, directly after its invention. A photographer called Roger Fenton was sent by the English Crown to create a visual record of war in the Crimea, where British, Turkish, and French soldiers fought against Tsarist troops from 1854 to 1855. With the technology at his disposal, he couldn’t take battle pictures. Instead, his photographs focus on portraits of Generals, Marshals, and other high ranking military officials, on camp life and topography. Common soldiers are only seen in formation or as aide de camp.
Fenton shot with a cosmetic camera. When he went there the English army was in a very bad condition, they were freezing, hungry and a lot of them had already died. So he produced propaganda pictures to serve his sponsors.
British soldiers honouring their French allies with a toast. Soldiers now have warm clothes, enough to eat and basic comforts were not denied to the British officers. We shouldn’t forget that he worked with exposure time that lasted about 8 minutes.
Isn’t it a good beginning for a medium that should tell the truth?
Matthew Brady was the first photographer who went to the battlefield to shoot there, but in fact he was famous for his studio portraits. He made portraits of Lincoln about which the latter said helped him to win the election. This picture shows Lincoln as a man with strong will due to the point of view from below his head.
In 1936 in the middle of the Spanish civil war Robert Capa, shot the picture with the title “ Death of a Spanish Militiaman”. It shows a republican soldier shot by the fascist at Cerro Muriano.
This photograph became one of the most known and controversial photographs of the last century. To make pictures from such a close distance was an unknown kind of war photography by then. Nobody had seen something like this before. R. Capa risked his life to make this picture.
The soldier spreads his arms out as the bullet hits him. The dying soldier is dressed in white and reminds of Christ in his almost unbelievable iconic pose, which quickly let to the suggestion that it was staged.
This would make it a very good propaganda image, but not the document it claimed to be. In the end it didn’t make a difference because the image had an big impact on support for the republicans. They had their icon to identify themselves with. The Spanish civil war was the last romantic war. Young people from all over Europe went there to fight for their believe.
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This image, and Fenton’s and Garder’s, are examples for war photographers who made photos up. I chose war documentary because it is a good example for the responsibility photographers can have.
James Nachtwey, war photographer today
To come to modern war photography I want to quote James Nachtwey a Magnum photographer since 1985.
“For me the strength of photography lies in its ability to evoke a sense of humanity. If it is used well it can be a powerful ingredient in the antidote to war”.
In my opinion one should ask whether it is possible to put an end to a form of human behaviour which has existed throughout history by means of photography. On the other hand it is also possible to abuse a war to get images, with which you can earn money and become famous.
Today, staged photo opportunities are used by candidates to influence popular opinion.
Presidential campaigns are often used by candidates to be seen by the voters, to speak to them and shake hands. Of course this situations give them the possibility to be photographed in an environment which gives them a certain image, like standing in a crowd of children or standing in front of a important national monument. It is meant to look like an every day American living a normal American life. This photo opportunities are staged to influence the popular opinion. In politics, it is not the photos that are created, it is the scenes that are. This is a very big difference.
Another form of manipulation are technically manipulated photos.
The first manipulated photo which appeared in press was by National Geographic.
In February 1982 the National Geographic magazine wanted to show a documentary about Tibet, its people and about their life under the occupation of China. The photographer who went there made a picture of a small boy with a Chinese soldiers hat on. A really loaded picture. National Geographic planned to put this image on the front page of the magazine. China’s government heard about that plan and called National Geographic. They told them that if they used this image on their front page, no journalist would be allowed to enter China again. So National G. had to use one of their inside stories for the title story. They chose a story about Egypt and its pyramids. To bring an impressive photo on the title they retouched one image of the article, brought two pyramids closer together, so they would fit on the cover.
Some people recognised the retouching, because it is impossible to see both pyramids from the point of which the photo was taken. Because of that National Geographic promised that they will never change the content of an image again. Whatever that means.
This was the first time a magazine or newspaper manipulated an image this way.
A lot of people think that because of the program Photoshop, it has became impossible to trust a photo as evidence for the truth. National Geographic retouched a photo nine years before Photoshop even appeared. Photoshop is just a new tool people can use, that’s it.
I showed you different ways of manipulation. I also would like to speak about some technical issues. About light, moment and point of view. For the uneducated or simply untrained eye, it is the easiest way to manipulate the observer. I want to give you some examples about the possibilities you have when you make a simple portrait. The lighting: When you light a person from below, it makes the portrayed person ugly because of the shadows under their eyes. Examples for that are Frankenstein and Dracula.
When you light a person from diagonal above you make the person more beautiful, you render the face nice and make even fat persons slimmer. When you shine with a soft light direct into the face it loses character and gets flat.
The point of view describes your relation to the portrayed person.
When you go below eye level you glorify somebody, you make statues out of them, and when you go above and look down you are better than them.
And in the end the moment. Everybody can image how important “the moment” is when you make the photo. Laughing, smiling, looking serious or even sad, everything is possible.
Who is responsible for the manipulation that appears in images?
Is it the media that makes the big manipulation? Or is it you as a observer who is forced to see with your eye in a certain way?
For “Goethe” there is no innocent eye. The opposite is fact. Every time we look at something, a sum of our circumstances, our biography looks with us. It defines and chooses what we see and what we think afterwards about it.
The media is just abusing the opportunities the eye as the visual receptor gives you to receive lies.
It is you the observer who is thinking in a certain way, you who allows your eye to move as the composition of the image makes it move. In movies there are very simple ways to influence the thoughts of the observer. A good example is the movie Gladiator where they retouched the movie. They took the light reflections out of the eyes of the antagonist to give him—even when he is looking normal—a bad atmosphere. You see it, don’t realise it, but you feel it.
I’m not here to say how to be not manipulated. I want to say that we should all be aware of what our eye is doing with us. To quote Susan Sontag: “Photographic images from wars cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalisation for mass suffering offered by established powers. Who caused the images that the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be challenged?”
Our eyes are educated in certain way.
A car is driving from left to right and another is driving from right to left. Which one is coming home?
Thank you very much.