Photoshop Crimes against Photography: exactly what are the charges?
Marc Feustel used the phrase “Photoshop crimes against photography” on his Eyecurious blog in connection with some of the work he saw displayed at Photoquai 2009. I saw the same exhibit, and I too was taken aback by some things. A stone sculpture comes to mind: flying around outside someone’s bedroom window in one of the photos (in all fairness, that photo was clearly labeled as digitally manipulated). However, I have to wonder at my own, and Marc’s, reaction. What precisely was it that bothered me about this?
Perhaps the label “photography”? Are two digital photos that have been merged and layered to be considered photography or is this a collage? It is clearly art, just as a collage of paper print photographs glued onto mattboard is art, so does it really make any difference what we call it?
I have asked a few artists about this, and have gotten some very ambiguous answers, mainly of the “Don’t ask don’t tell” variety. It seems to me that no one is quite sure where the boundaries lie. Someone likened the brightness/contrast feature on Photoshop to the filters one might use on a darkroom enlarger. Yes, it’s an awful lot easier to swipe the little graphic button on the photoshop option than it is to fumble for the correct filter in your little redlit darkroom, and perhaps it takes one-one hundredth of the skill, but is it any less legitimate because of that? I have digital photographs that I have done absolutely nothing to, and others that I have passed through Photoshop in order to crop and tilt, or contrast or tint in some way. Are the former more valuable and more legitimate simply because they took less work?
But other than necessary functions like contrast, there are other Photoshop possibilities that may be less defensible. I enjoy using some of the “instant artist” features on Photoshop to make interesting compositions, or to mask imperfections or problematic aspects of my photos. Sometimes this has taken many hours and I consider it time spent working on “art,” or at the very least, on “craft.” For instance, I use a photo of people celebrating in the street as an icon for this blog. In order to make the faces unrecognizable, and thus, the picture usable on the web, I treated the photo to a hit from the artistic drop down menu on photoshop. I ended up with something that I can use as a decorative element on my blog, but have not titled or claimed as my work, out of uneasiness over the whole process. That is as it should be, I believe, but the problem is, I really like the way the picture came out. So much so, that I jokingly considered buying a canvas and some acrylics and copying it out to hang on the wall, as my own original painting. Then I didn’t think about it again, till I saw a poster announcing a gallery show by a painter, who seemed to have done just that! I looked at the painter’s work, and I was convinced that he had copied his own Photoshopped photos quite faithfully onto canvas. Now what is that? Is that a crime? Prude that I am, I tend to think so, though I can’t quite put my finger on the exact charges.
Now, let me add, that I have no idea if that was really what this artist had done. It may have all been in my head, considering that I had sleezily thought of doing this same dastardly thing myself. But that brings me to another problem, all this technology leaves us quite suspicious of each other’s work. Maybe we should make disclaimers beneath every photograph, in order to make it clear what we are presenting, and what charges we are answering to. Here is my first attempt at full disclosure:
I did nothing to this photo. Nothing, I tell you. I downloaded it from my camera and slapped it onto this website. That makes it legit!
Uh-oh. I put it through Photoshop. I cropped it and I tweaked the brightness/contrast. I admit it. This is no longer a “real” photograph, right?
What? You don’t believe that this was all I did to the Antony Gormley/Hayward Gallery photo? Okay, I’ll come clean. It had a wicked tilt, so when I rotated it 5 degrees, I ended up with wedges of nothing in three of the corners. Thus came Photoshop’s rubber stamp for cloning to the rescue. Blue sky, extra paving stones and one whole side sliver of the Hayward Gallery miraculously appeared. Then I used the funny little smudgy finger to make it all less noticeable. (though you can still see the blank area after the word “the” on the cloth banner hanging from the building). Too much information? Don’t ask, don’t tell.
Well, if that Gormley isn’t a real photograph, then Good Lord, what is this?
I went crazy with the artistic menu. Accented edges, brush strokes, palette knife. Had a blast, and in the process turned it into a tarted up piece of trash, right? I can hear the sirens and see the spinning red lights already. Might as well send this visual prostitute to the digital garbage can before the art police (or vice squad) arrive. But dammit, I like it! So, please, somebody, explain to me… what are the charges?