Hypothesis: Photography and Truth: Can a photograph lie?

“Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.” (Sontag, 1977)

Photography is a way to demonstrate how people view the world. It started off with the camera obscura and making images in dark rooms. Photography has now advanced to taking photos on digital cameras and even being able to crate mages with Artificial Intelligence (A.I). When we were first introduced to photography, artists saw it as a threat as they thought that photography removed the personal touch from making images. Photography is an illusion and a representation of reality just like all other forms of art. Images can be manipulated to hide the truth from the audience there have been many cases of this seen through the years. One of the most well-known examples is the ‘The Struggling Girl’ by Kevin Carter. This image didn’t show the full scene and caused controversy when the world found out. It mislead people in to thinking that the girl was going to be taken by the vulture and that Carter just took the image and didn’t help. In reality, out of the frame there was a feeding centre that the girl was making her way to. Photography now has a new technology called Artificial Intelligence which is rapidly making advances for example, Siri on iPhones and chat GPT, where you can get an instant response. There are many benefits of using A.I such as it gives you an immediate response, there’s a reduction in human error, decisions are unbiased, and they can perform repetitive jobs that people don’t want to do. However, as A.I advances it is becoming more dangerous to society for example, Geoffrey Linton who was known as the ‘Godfather of A.I’ resigning from Google. When speaking to the BBC he stated that AI chatbots were “quite scary” as he expresses his concerns about the “existential risk of what happens when these things get more intelligent than us” (Taylor & Hern, 2023).The thought of AI becoming more intelligent than us is a scary thought as there is a possible risk to humanity. The two images that I have chosen to demonstrate how images can be manipulated are “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” by Roger Fenton and Taj Mahal and train in Agra by Steve McCurry

Photographers have been manipulating their images before the digital age. There were very basic methods such as using scissors and knifes to cut negatives out of the image and then reproducing it or using opaque watercolours to go over the image. Images could also be manipulated in dark rooms by using methods such as dodging and burning and masking. Photographers also used double exposure techniques where they would place two or more exposures on top of each other to create a single image.

A case that I have studied to demonstrate how photographer hide the truth is ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Death’ taken by Roger Fenton in 1855, which is possibly one of the oldest staged images. The image displays the Valley with cannon balls rolling down the path/road this left people questioning did Fenton place the cannonball in the road? There are two images one with cannon balls on the road and one without. to create the final image Fenton made two exposures from the same tripod position. The first exposure was taken with the cannonballs to the left of the road but before taking the second photo, he oversaw the scattering of the cannonballs on the road. The image intrigued documentary film maker Errol Morris as he went on to further investigate the image, publishing a section in the ‘New York Times’ called “Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg”. Morris interviewed many historians who had different views on whether the image was staged or not. This left Morris unsatisfied by his findings so travelled to Ukraine where Fenton took the image. When at the location, Morris and Dennis Purcell (an optical engineer) noticed a group of five small rocks that were positioned lower than they were in the photo with the cannonball is the road. This led Morris to come to the conclusion that the photo was staged as the rocks had moved by gravity. (Zhang, 2012)

The investigation carried out by Morris shows the length that Fenton and other photographers are willing to go to get to his final image and conceal the truth. Overall, I think that the image has been manipulated in some way as the placement of the cannonballs on the road look ‘too good to be true.’ Whether Roger Fenton moved the cannonballs himself or used multi exposer to fake the placement of cannonballs in the road.

As technology has advanced it has become easier for photographers to stage their images and conceal the truth, by using many apps, eg. photoshop, AI tools eg. ‘Dreamstudio’ and using actors in their images, to create a perfectly timed final image. In a case that I have studied ‘Taj Mahal and train in Agra’ by Steve McCurry it depicts a steam train with two men on it, with smoke coming out from the under the train as it goes past the Taj Mahal in the background. Teju Cole states in an article from The New York Times Magazine McCurry’s images are “astonishingly boring” (Cole, 2016) because of how staged they are and look. It is clear when looking at the image that McCurry has staged the image as the timing of the image creates ‘a too perfect picture’ (Cole, 2016). A lot of McCurry’s work has been taken in India, Cole argues that McCurry is portraying India as a country that hasn’t moved on with the modern times whereas, people can argue that McCurry wants to explore vanishing cultures. When I first saw the ‘Taj Mahal and train in Agra’ it drew me in as I wondered how McCurry had timed taking the image so perfectly however, after some further research into the work of Steve McCurry I found that most of his work has the same persona and are staged in some way.

In conclusion, I think it is evident that photographs can lie as both of my case studies demonstrate how photographers manipulate their images in various ways to conceal the truth. We as viewers don’t get to see what is happening outside of the frame – we only see what the photographer wants to show us and so we are left to interpret the image individually.

Bibliography

Cole, T., 2016. A Too-Perfect Picture. The New York Times Magazine, 30 March.

Sontag, S., 1977. On Photography. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Taylor, J. & Hern, A., 2023. ‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton quits Google and warns over dangers of misinformation. The Guardian, 2 May.

Zhang, M., 2012. PetaPixel. [Online]
Available at: https://petapixel.com/2012/10/01/famous-valley-of-the-shadow-of-death-photo-was-most-likely-staged/#:~:text=After%20reaching%20the%20much%20shelled%20valley%20approaching%20Sebastopol,scattering%20of%20the%20cannonballs%20on%20the%20road%20itself.
[Accessed 5 July 2023].

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