When I first looked at the two images in the course notes, I immediately thought it was a film set. I did not, as suggested, feel uncomfortable. It was clearly a model town, built for what ever purpose, built somewhere, probably in the UK. The image of Flicks Night Club showed the traffic would be travelling on the left because of the position of the lines in the road.
The text suggested I should feel unsafe, but while I assumed it was a film set I felt completely neutral. I imaged a film crew and actors working at their respective crafts. The title “Public Order” did not give anything away, I just assumed that the set had been used for a police drama.
Then I discovered the buildings had been constructed as a police training site. As soon as I understood the context of the buildings, I became curious. I am aware that all service personnel, police, firemen, paramedics all have to train and in order to do this they must train in as close to a real situation as possible. I am now interested in learning more, how do they use the buildings, what scenarios do they work through?
I question the wording in the course text:
By using a visual strategy that makes us question and probe the work, Pickering enables us to challenge society norms that we take for granted or wouldn’t otherwise think about.
[OCA, Context and Narrative course text, page 36]
The term “society norm” is a subjective term, not quantifiable as it is used here, therefore I am not clear what society norm is being taken for granted.
The narrative I took from these images is one of safety and reassurance.
I consider “Public Order” is a very effective use of documentary as it draws to our attention the processes the police go through in this country to train. I certainly would like to know more about how they use the buildings and what happens during a training session.
As I progress through this first part of the course, I am coming to realise that no photographic image can be “trusted”. In the extract “The Real and the Digital” from her book Photography: A Critical Introduction, Liz Wells writes:
…..Here, we need to note that digital media – with its ability to create, manipulate and edit images – has given new prominence to arguments about the nature of photography and taken them into the popular domain.
(Wells, 2009)
The ability to create, manipulate and edit images is now mainstream rather than only carried out by the technicians of previous photographic methods. Previously, lack of knowledge and understanding the photographic techniques often meant that images were accepted as real. The set of images “The Cottingley Fairies” made by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths in 1917 were believed to be real, and continued to be considered real until 1970.
I do not believe that “digital” and “real” are part of the same argument. Real images are those which have not been manipulated, and can be both digital images, or made using older style technology.
In Russia, during the Stalinist regime many images were manipulated to remove those who were thought to be against the state, as I show in my review of “The Commissar Vanishes, The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia” by David King. None of those images were manipulated digitally, they were painstakingly airbrushed or touched up.
Now, because of the increased access to simple photographic facilities, such as camera phones, and the ability to edit images made in this way, there is a greater understanding of how images are created and therefore how they can be manipulated. It is generally considered acceptable to manipulate these images, and that non of them should automatically be perceived as real. I believe that it is difficult to tell if an image is real or not, and that has always been the case, but with the digital images created today, society has come to accept that they may have been manipulated, rather than believe them to be real until proved otherwise.
So what about the situation where an image is produced as evidence in court? Perhaps the only way to confirm this is for more than one person to take photographs of the same subject from difference perspectives, or for more than one eye witness, who was present at the event, to verify the image’s provenance. So maybe anyone gathering photographic evidence from now on must ensure they have more than one photograph of the subject taken from different angles, (it would be difficult to edit each image so that they appear real when viewed together) or ensure there is an eyewitness prepared to confirm the reality of the image.
The only reality as Roland Barthe believes, according to Liz Wells:
…..it is the result of an event in the world, evidence of the passing of a moment of time that once was and is no more, which left a kind of trace of the even on the photograph.
(Wells, 2009)
So any photograph, manipulated or not, must at some time have been taken of a real event. Without that reality, the photograph could not have been taken, so on that basis must be real.
As we can see from the examples shown, The Cottingley Fairies, and the images in The Commissar Disappears by David King, any image could have been manipulated. All that the more recent digital functionality has done is to make manipulation easier.
Bibliography
Wells, L. (2009) Photography: A Critical Introduction (4th Edition). London: Routledge.
Dolphins have been seen swimming in the Great Lake at Blenheim Palace!!
I took this image of the Great Lake, Blenheim Palace, on a bright sunny day during the winter and I decided to introduce a dolphin into the lake.
The photograph of the dolphin was taken on a whale watching trip in Sri Lanka last year. Unfortunately we didn’t see any whales, but lots of dolphins. The water was choppy so it was difficult to capture the dolphins, as soon as they appeared, the boat rocked and I had to reframe, by which time they had disappeared.
I did manage to get some images, and chose this one to introduce into the lake. It was an overcast day in Sri Lanka and the original image was grey, unlike the blue of the Great Lake.
I layered the dolphin onto the image of the Great Lake, but had to change the colour to blue without losing the definition of the reflection in the water. I tried several different options, and went for the clone stamp tool – a tedious process but I think it worked well.
I learnt that I need to explore the options of layering in Photoshop as I am sure I could have produced this image in a more efficient way than using the clone stamp tool.
For this exercise I selected two issues which have been reported in the papers. One incident takes place on a London tube, and the other relates to a photograph of HRH Prince Andrew Duke of York.
The first issue is of a coloured man who appears to be talking to a child sitting with his father on a tube train in London, and then an argument ensues with a woman passenger. It turned out that these photographs were frames extracted from a video clip taken by another passenger and uploaded onto social media. The coloured man was actually racially abusing the father and child because they were Jewish. Another passenger asked him to stop, (his hand can just be seen in one of the frames), and as a result he was also abused by the coloured man. Finally a Muslim woman stepped in, and she was also racially abused. The whole incident (at least the video) lasted just a few minutes, but during that time those involved were traumatised by the comments from the abuser.
Are these pictures objective?
For
There wouldn’t have been time for the event to be staged.
Taken from one viewpoint and the man is in view at all times.
Against
They have been selected from the video clip. Who by and why? The newspaper editor?
They should be viewed in context with the original video clip.
No text is shown. The conversations are a relevant part of the incident.
There was much praise for the Muslim woman who intervened, rightly so, but others tried to intervene as well, as can be heard in the video clip. The Muslim women was hailed as a “hero”. Was this because she is a Muslim women taking on a coloured male? Would a white male have received the same accolade?
In conclusion, I suggest this set of photographs as published are not objective as they do not convey the whole story, they have been selected by someone who I believe was not an eye witness to the event.
At the time of writing this blog, HRH Prince Andrew, Duke of York, is being taken to task by the media and there are many images of him currently being published in newspapers and on the internet. It is not my intention to comment in any way on the rights and wrongs of these issues, nor on what he has or has not done. I am just looking at one of these images and commenting on how objective it appears to me and why.
Firstly, one of the photographs widely publicized is of him, his arm around a young girl, and Ghislaine Maxwell standing behind them. The Duke says he has no knowledge of this incident and the image must have been “doctored”. This may be the case but it has come to light that this image is actually a cropped extract of an original showing much more detail and context.
Image taken from Google Images, but is widely available on other website
On Monday 25th November 2019 the following image was published in the Daily Mail.
Note: this was scanned from a newspaper cutting, so print is showing through from the other side of the page.
This image could, of course, have also been altered. However, the Daily Mail cites an “image expert” called Professor Hany Farid saying in the Sunday Times that it bore “no obvious signs of manipulation”. As I hadn’t come across Professor Farid before I carried out an internet a search and his Wikipedia entry starts with the words:
Hany Farid is an American university professor who specializes in the analysis of digital images.
It is not clear whether Professor Farid examined the image in detail, forensically, so I cannot assume his comments are correct. However this image does widen the context of the original cropped version, in that it is easier to establish where it was taken. So why was it cropped before publishing, who cropped it, and why was the original kept away from the media? Was this leaked to a journalist and why?
Having seen this latest uncropped version of the image I would suggest that it was cropped for a reason by someone who had a particular purpose for doing so, and if it had been altered it would have happened at the same time, possibly by the same person.
The only eye-witnesses to this event are those in the photograph, as well as the photographer, and none of them could be classed as reliable as they all have a different view on the validity of its content.
My conclusion to this dilemma is that because digital images can be altered so easily, without the original RAW file, it is difficult to establish exactly what did appear in the original image and why it was cropped.
Context and Narrative 