When is a photograph not a photograph

At what point does graphic manipulation convert a photograph
into graphic creation?

We start by perhaps burning in the sky and changing the white
balance.

Intermediate stages would be things like adding a colour cast
or removing faint telephone lines.

What about removing a background digitally to achieve the same
result that could have been done by placing a piece of black card
behind a macro shot?

Adding a better sky is now easy and seems to be fairly common.

I'm curious about what people think about this.

-Mike
PS. I'm talking about art photography not photojournalism.

 

Hi Mike!

To me, everything revolves around "one's conception" of photography. In a
world where manipulation of a photo has become common place, the
photographer has the leeway to express him(her)self through the taking of
the photo and subsequent "arrangement".

While some painters would painfully "recreate" a certain scene, others would
seek more freedom and express themselves in other ways. This opened up the
way to many schools of painting. This is referred to as art (rubbish to
some).

In the same way, photographers are free to express themselves if they so
wish, using different lenses, filters and post photography manipulation.
This is not the same as modifying the photo to "trick the observer" or in
short, a photo that "lies". Sometimes, a particular scenery has "burned
itself into my mind". It is possible then to try recreate a particular mood,
say one of peace and tranquility. Arranging the photo to give the observer
this same feeling is indeed art, at least to my mind. This is NOT "trick
photography".

However, although Photoshop and the likes of it are in many people's houses,
although simple to operate, they do not confer good taste to every user. All
we need to remember is the advent of desktop publishing and the atrocious
flyers that people produced, with too many fonts, bolds and underlined, not
forgetting thick lines around text, etc.

Cheers,
Marcel
PS This should be an interesting an vigorous thread.

 

I mean changing the sky completely. Darkening it by using
orange or red filters on B&W is less severe since just having
the picture in B&W is already changing it.

Changing tone and contrast etc are mild forms of manipulation
which I don't have a problem with but adding a rock from one
picture into another is going too far.

I just can't decide where to draw the line.

Removing power lines and other man made objects from a
landscape to me is just as fake but the picture is destroyed by
leaving them in.

-Mike

 

When I see an amazing landscape I don't initially notice the car parked
in the middle of it but if I were to look at a photo of the same scene the
car would jump out at me.

That's the problem. With Photoshop anything can be done. I took
a photograph of my niece and her husband a few years ago when
they got married on a tropical island and placed them in a snow
scene as a joke. It looked real but should it be presented to a
viewer without explanation?

-Mike

 

This question has a long history. It is not unique to digital
photography. An accomplished darkroom person can do a LOT to a film
negative or transparency.

In fact, one of the earliest questions was, "is it art?" That is,
painters felt there was no such thing as an art photograph. If it wasn't
done entirely by hand, it wasn't art. Thank goodness we have come a
long way from that.

However, I think the question is of philosophical interest only, and is
not really an important question for art photography. For
photojournalism, though, it is indeed an important question.

 

....

An art teacher at my college once told me that even photographs are a form
of abstract art-- less so than a painting perhaps, but still abstract. Even
when you take a picture of someone, it is not real; tones, shades, lens
distortion of object size, loss of color if b/w, and so on make all
photographs a form of abstraction of the real world. So there is no "point"
at which manipulation of photo changes it into a graphic creation, the
original photo already is a graphic creation.

 

The real question is one of purpose.
If the purpose is to represent a captured piece of reality, or "moment in
time," then the manual exclusion or introduction of any subject/object
element would negate the legitimacy of that true moment of reality. White
balance and other minor adjustments are not relevant to that question so
long as the goal is to render the most humanly-perceived rendition of the
reality.

In this most strict sense, this "rule" would be limited primarily to
documentary photography.

Any area other than documentary is entirely debatable, and will never be
settled in mutual agreement.
This is why one must understand one's own intent as a happy-snapping
photog...AND...one's audience/client/end-use as a pro or PJ.

The rest of the palaver is all moonshine because it's entirely dependant
upon who is asking and who is answering the question. Opinions will forever
remain all over the board, and will continually ebb and flow with the times.

Mark

 

I wonder about some of the images people have been sent to prison for
here in UK. Seems to me that pixels arranged in a certain way on a
computer screen cannot logically constitute a criminal offence,
particularly if no one can identify the participants. How is it
different to a picture I might paint and, if it was in the style of
Picasso, who could say what the underlying sentiments were?
I'm all in favour of the police clamping down on this stuff but I wonder
if the basic concept has been seriously challenged in the courts.

 

I totally agree. Completely a matter of degrees, how much a photo is
distorted for the sake of art, from the original portraying the subject as
closely as possible regarding shape, features, etc to distortions of object
edges, colors, introducing new objects or removing objects from a photo,
etc. Even the mere fact that a photo crops out subjects is a form of
distortion-- the human head/eye can pan and scan a scene and take in more
info than the limited cropped subjects of a photo that tell a story.

 

Goes well with the approach "All that is passed is a ruin". Does it matter
to anyone how one sees that ruin? It does for the one concerned. So why not
make it as one wants to remember that ruin? ;-)
Marcel

 

Technically, any manipulation would make it a 'graphic creation'.
However, adding, removing, or changing any significant picture element
would do that, in my opinion, which manipulations of color, and lighting
to make the picture better represent what the photographer saw would
retain the 'photograph' designation. Just my opinion.

 

By your definition, a hand-painted painting based on a photograph (an
activity many painters do) is still a photograph. So there it is.

 

OK--I know Bret is Butthead...
....Should we assume you're Beavis?

 

First let's define what you call a "Photograph". Are Moholy-Nagy's
Photograms, Photographs?

Is directly minipulated Polaroid film, a photograph?


*****************************************************

"It is a good thing to read books, and need not be a
bad thing to write them, but in any case, it is a
pious thing to collect them."

Fredrick Locker-Lampson
(1821-1895)

 

Oh, good grief.

Talk about dragging your political agenda in by the left hind foot . . .

N.

 

Thus spake Mike Warren unto the assembled multitudes:

I would contend that a photograph stops being a photograph as soon as *any*
manipulation is done to the originally captured image. After that, it's
just an image with photographic origin. I think the word is Greek in
origin, translating literally as "light written" or "light writing" or
something like that.

 

I don't know whether it's possible to make this dilineation on the basis
of particular techniques, but this has clearly crossed the line:

http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/index.php?act=Attach&type=post&id=8771

 

Not with a photo of a newly married couple in the snow.

-Mike

 

Have you been sneeking a look at my photos?

-Mike

 

No. Digital just makes it easier. I'm talking about created art as opposed
to recording a scene because the scene itself is the art. (as seen by the
photographer).

-Mike