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.