Chapter two
Dismantling the "truth" effect of the photographic image

All images that appear in the press are manipulated in one way, shape, or form, whether they're by choice - by that image being chosen over another - or by cropping, or by digital manipulation. You're being manipulated a thousand different ways, and as long as you are somewhat aware of the fact, then there's not so much to be afraid of. But if you think that what you're seeing is the truth, then you're in for big trouble. — David Byrne, 1994.

[M]anipulation is the essence of photography, photography would not exist without it . — Victor Burgin, 1976.

As we have seen in the preceding chapter, many different reasons have established the photographic image as a truthful, unquestionable representation of reality. However, recent criticism has challenged the positions previously discussed, asking "whether the photographic process itself really guarantees much of anything about the relation between image and imaged" (Snyder and Allen, 1975: 148). As we shall see, photographs are constructed and manipulated in a vast number of ways. As Annette Kuhn summarizes it: "Photography actually involves just as much artifice as does any other mode of visual representation. There is plenty of scope for human intervention at every stage of making photographs: photos are no more innocent than any other product of human society" (Kuhn, 1985: 26). As the appearance of digital-imaging technology seems to announce the end of the blind trust we once had in the photographic image, it is important to remember that the question of the manipulation of photographs is not new. Number of artists, theorists and critics have challenged this assumption through their works and this, since 1839. As Martha Rosler, an artist and critical theorist, reminds us in her essay "Image Simulations, Computer Manipulations: Some Considerations:" "Any familiarity with photographic history shows that manipulation is integral to photography" (Rosler, 1996: 37). In this chapter, I intend to examine this history of manipulation, the different manners, mostly technical, which have contradicted the supposed integrity of the photograph for decades and the ways in which theorists and artists have helped dismantle the myth of photographic truth, stressing the constructed, artifactual and ideological characteristics of the medium.
It has been widely acknowledged that virtually since the camera was invented, photographers have had opportunities to manipulate images and distort reality. The first alteration of a photograph can be traced back to 1839, the very same year photography was invented. Helmut Gernsheim, in his History of Photography, distinguishes Swiss Johann Baptist Isenring, a copperplate engraver of topographical views, as the first person who retouched a photograph, with his attempt to give daguerreotypes a more lifelike appearance, coloring them with dry powders. More specifically, Isenring over-painted an image and scratched on the silvered plate the pupils of the eyes to correct the unsharpness caused by the sitter's blinking (Gernsheim, 1969: 160). However, according to Gisèle Freund, it was a German photographer named Hampfstängl who invented the first technique to retouch the negative in the mid-1840s, a decade after Talbot's negative-positive process had begun replacing the daguerreotype, and in 1855, at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, Hampfstängl exhibited two versions of the same portrait: one retouched, the other not (Freund, 1974: 68-9). Retouching, which implies a direct human interference, marked a decisive moment for photography, the "beginning of its decay." Indeed, as Freund notes, the inconsiderate and abusive use of the technique "eliminated all the characteristics of a faithful reproduction, taking away photography's fundamental value" (Freund, 1974: 69).

Retouching

Within the wide ranges of techniques available to photographers to enhance their work, the most commonly used is probably retouching. According to Gordon Baldwin retouching can be defined as "the careful manual alteration of the appearance of a print or negative" that is "most often used in portraiture to make cosmetic improvement to a sitter's appearance, such as removing minor facial blemishes, softening outlines or wrinkles, or 'powdering' shining noses" (Baldwin, 1991: 74).
Photography has been linked with portraiture from its beginnings, or at least as soon as the time of exposure was reduced enough to allow it [14] . This application of photography to portraiture was clearly the result of the public's demand[15] . As we have seen earlier, photography can be understood as the ultimate response to a constant need for more accurate representation and, as Naomi Rosenblum remarks, the new medium continued "the impulse to represent human form that goes back to the dawn of art" (Rosenblum, 1981: 39). As a result of this need for an always more truthful likeness, portrait photography quickly supplanted the miniature painting which until then had the favor of the upper classes [16] . In 1859, Charles Baudelaire, who Beaumont Newhall regards as "one of the most brilliant and perceptive art critics of his time," wrote about his contemporaries' vain and narcissistic desire to have their being immortalized on a photographic plate, describing the "madness," and the "extraordinary fanaticism [that] took possession of all these sun-worshippers." As he states: "From that moment our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze at its trivial image on a scrap of metal" (in Newhall, 1980: 112). However, as Helmut Gernsheim remarks, this craze did not happen without influencing the new technology (Gernsheim, 1969: 234). Even if over the course of the nineteenth century mirrors and other devices of reproduction had streamed into people's lives, the advent of photography changed the most radically the way people perceived their own appearances. Regarded as truthful and realistic, photographs materialized the difference between idealized images of oneself and the reality of one's appearance. In her book Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture, Kathy Peiss stresses that what most vexed the public during the early decades of photography was that the photograph revealed the face and the body with a degree of detail and precision men and women of the nineteenth century were not used to (Peiss, 1998: 45). As N. P. Lerebours, one of the most prominent early French photographic portraitists, writes in his 1873 Traité de Photographie: "The most terrible enemy which the daguerreotype has to combat is, without contradiction, human vanity" (in Gernsheim, 1982: 96). Moreover, Lerebours stresses the differences between painting and photography in terms of customers' expectations:

When a portrait is painted, the flattering hand of the artist knows how to soften the irregular features of the face, to make graceful a sting pose, and to give an effect of grace and dignity to the whole. Therein lies the talent of the portrait painter; one expects a likeness, but above all one wants to look beautiful - two demands which are often incompatible. It is not thus with the photographic artist: unable to correct the imperfections of nature, his portraits unfortunately often have the fault of portraying the sitter too truthfully; they are in a way permanent mirrors where vanity does not always find what it wants (in Gernsheim, 1982: 96).

Reportedly, some customers would leave the photographer's studio when they felt that the accuracy of the photograph happened to be too painful (Peiss, 1998: 46). The public, accustomed to the idealized and flattering portraits of painters, expected photographers to conform to the embellishing practices of the artists and as a result, clients would ask for retouched or tinted pictures [17] which tended to lessen the gap between self-image and the pictorial truth, offering a more pleasing likeness (Peiss, 1998: 45). This type of demand favored the talbotype, also known as calotype, which offered advantages over the more recognized daguerreotype with respect to its application to portraiture. An article published in Austria even specifically promoted the talbotype's ability to improve the artistic effects of pictures by "toning down or removing anything unattractive, like wrinkles, which may have been reproduced with too great accuracy" (in Gernsheim 1969: 466). As Susan Sontag remarks: "The news that the camera could lie made getting photographed much more popular" (Sontag, 1973: 86). Even if photographers first complained about their customers' demands [18], they quickly integrated retouching techniques into their practices (Gernsheim, 1969: 466). As a result, retouching became a common practice for photographers, an inherent part of the art of portrait photography, and they became a "curious hybrid of painter-photographer" (Gernsheim, 1969: 234). Technically, they would interfere manually with the negative or the print to "beautify" their clients, removing blemishes and adding balance to the portrait (Gernsheim, 1969: 234). Aspiring to conform to the Victorian ideal of beauty trends of the 1850s, photographers were lead to follow carefully determined recommendations. The Photographic News magazine suggested the following instructions to achieve the perfect picture:

(For women). A handsome face is of an oval shape, both front view and in profile. The nose slightly prominent in the center, with small, well-rounded end, fine nostrils; small, full, projecting lips, the upper one short and curved upwards in the center, the lower one slightly hanging down in the center, both turned up a little at the corners, and receding inside; chin round and small; very small, low cheek-bones, not perceptibly rising above the general rotundity. Eyes large, inclined upwards at the inner angles, downwards at outer angles; upper eyelids long, forehead round, smooth and small; hair rather profuse. Of all things, do not draw the hair over the forehead if well formed, but rather up and away. See the Venus de Medici, and for comparison see also Canova's Venus, in which latter the hair is too broad.
(For men). An intellectual head has the forehead and chin projecting; bottom lip projecting a little; eyebrows rather near together and low (raised eyebrows indicate weakness). Broad forehead, overhanging eyelids, sometimes cutting across the iris to the pupil. (in Gernsheim, 1969: 235).

Women's waists were left to the photographer's good will and aesthetic judgment: "The retoucher may slice off, or curve the lady's waist after his own idea of shape and form and size" (Gernsheim, 1969: 235). Dorothy Wilding, an influential studio portraitist in Britain, was active in London from 1914 to the late 1950s. Trained as a retoucher, she recalls in her 1955 autobiography In Pursuit of Perfection, her views on retouching and tries to correct the impression some people might have that the enhancing technique is about making the sitter better looking than s/he is in real life: "It isn't that at all. It's more to make a portrait a fairer representation of a sitter than it would be if a negative were left alone" (Wilding, 1955: 125). However, according to Gernsheim, purists will always object to retouching since it represents an "injudicious mixture of two diametrically opposed artistic media" (Gernsheim, 1969: 164).
Another similar technique to disguise physical "flaws" that has been used for decades by skilled professionals, especially in the area of advertising, is airbrushing. This technique is based on a mechanical brush that uses no bristles to apply the paint, but instead, compressed air which is forced through a fine nozzle to break up the paint into an ultra fine mist. This mist, which can be broad or fine, is then directed to an exact location on the photograph. Thanks to airbrushing an artist can carefully "paint" a light tone to reduce a dark area and conversely use a darker pigment to cover a lighter tone. This technique gives artists the most control and allows them to produce textures that are difficult to obtain by conventional methods. All work is done on a work print, not on the original as it is considered very risky to work on any original print.

Photographic Tricks

In addition to retouching, it is worth noting that early photographic history is filled with examples of technical tricks made possible by the camera to alter representation of reality. Double exposures, "spirit photographs," double printings and others were enthusiastically described in popular nineteenth-century books on "photographic amusements" (Ades, 1986: 7). In the first half of this century for instance, April Fool's photographic fakes were popular with the public and in the 1920s and 1930s, altered photographs were enjoyed for their humor or sensationalism (Lovell, 1997: HREF). In his book, Hoaxes, Curtis MacDougall examines different types of doctored photographs and discusses examples of images of giant sea creatures or Viking ships that were published in the print media. Photographs have often been used to show evidence of paranormal phenomena relying on the belief people have that "the camera never lies." The Cottingley Fairies are a famous example. In 1917, two young girls produced photographs of fairies (see figure 6). Several photography experts declared that the pictures had not been doctored and the girls were supported in their claims by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a fervent believer in the occult. The trick was finally admitted and was much simpler than anything speculated: Elsie Wright and her cousin Frances Griffith had just posed with paper cut-outs held in place by hat pins (Farquhar, 1996: HREF).
Another technical tricks made possible by the camera's properties are double exposures, which are the result of a second exposure in a camera of a negative. This produces a combination of two images in a single print from the same negative (Baldwin, 1991: 40). This artifact gave birth to the curious photographic genre of spirit photography which was believed to capture on film the likeness of a deceased person (see figure 7). Even though these photographs were only the products of a technical artifact, many people believed in their truthfulness given the automatic characteristic of the camera. It is interesting to note that even today, the use of the camera as evidence of supernatural events, such as UFOs for examples, is still very popular and regularly, specialists are asked to dismiss these visual "proofs."

"Darkroom Magic"

As Fred Ritchin, a former picture editor for The New York Times Magazine who writes extensively on issues of documentary and digital photography, explains in his essay "Photojournalism in the Age of Computers," another effective method of manipulation that has been practiced from the beginnings of photography occurs in the form of pasting together different photographs and then reshooting the obtained picture, making the new image look like an original and leaving the negative untouched (Ritchin, 1990: 29). This technique, known as "combination print," was casually practiced to compensate the limitations of the early technology. The first emulsions indeed, did not allow photographers to shoot simultaneously the sky and the landscape [19] . Therefore, two pictures were taken and the two negatives were later combined into a single print in the darkroom. Parisian photographer Gustave Le Gray used this method to produce his famous seascapes and, according to Mark Haworth-Booth, curator of photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Camille Silvy created his 1858 River Scene using the same technique (in Meyer, HREF, see also figure 8). However, very quickly combination prints were made not only to redeem the initial technical restrictions of the medium, but also to create one's own images. It is important to understand that at this point the claim of the truth effect of photography was greatly challenged, the combination print techniques allowing the camera to become a tool for artistic expression, and not just a tool of neutral representation. This claim of the creative nature of photography brought up one of the central debates in the history of photography; the artistic use totally conflicting with the "objective" nature of the photograph. Many skilled and talented artists used this technique to create their own, sometimes fantasized, representations of reality, notably with composites. Henry Peach Robinson, an early practitioner of the technique, described the combination print process as:

A method which enables the photographer to represent objects in different planes in proper forms, to keep the true atmospheric and linear relation of varying distances, and by which a picture can be divided into separate portions for execution, the parts to be afterwards printed together on one paper, thus enabling the operator to devote all his attention to a single figure or sub-group at a time, so that if any part be imperfect from any cause, it can be substituted by another without the loss of the whole picture, as would be the case if taken at one operation (in Mitchell, 1992: 163-4).

Probably one of the most acclaimed perpetrators of this technique [20] is Oscar Gustave Rejlander who made elaborate compositions with several negatives, carrying the process to an extreme, in the 1860s. His controversial The Two Ways of Life of 1857 (see figure 9), for instance, was a montage of thirty different negatives that took him six weeks to complete (Newhall, 1982: 74).
In his essay "Beyond reality: art photography," photography historian Marc Mélon uses the term "'demechanized' photography" to qualify Rejlander's work and discusses the consequences of the manipulation of the photographic image:

Photography was a medium that was recognized to offer a faithful portrait of the world. To manipulate a photograph, retouch it and take it apart, in order to reconstitute it in an order acknowledged to be artificial, was tantamount to manipulating the world itself and to dominating its disorder. The task of taking reality apart and reassembling figures within the world of the image could be compared to the task of the moral law, which separates good from evil and saves the world by imposing a new order upon it (Mélon, 1986: 82).

Apparently, Rejlander may have realized this, or might have simply been discouraged by too much criticism, and denounced the combination print process in a letter to Robinson, allegedly writing that he was "tired of photography for the public, particularly composite photos, for there call be no gain and there is no honour only cavil and misrepresentation" (in Newhall, 1982: 76). Nevertheless, the principle of the composite image was never abandoned since that time. Therefore, in a sense, it can be considered as the core of photo-manipulation as well as the precursor of digital imaging in terms of its "cut and paste" principle [21] . In the 1920s, the process, even though its intent and results differ radically from Rejlander's and Robinson's, was revived under the label "photomontage." This approach was used with infinite variations by constructivists, surrealists, dadaïsts, and futurists. It is best exemplified by the work of artists such as Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Christian Schad, Alexander Rodtchenko, Man Ray, and especially John Heartfield (1891-1968) who used photomontages to criticize Nazi Germany in the 1930s (for examples of these artists' work see figure 10). Photomontages implicitly meant that photography is a social construction that one cannot and should not rely on blindly.

It needs also to be noted here that in the 1960s, various artists also used the camera and the combination print technique in an effort to dismantle the truth effect of the photograph. One precursor for this use of the camera was Frenchman Yes Klein who, in 1960, conceived a photograph, entitled The Leap into the Void, which shows the artist diving out of a second-story window (see figure 11). The photograph was forged and yet it presented the event as if it had really happened, as if it were real. Following Klein's path, many photographers, such as John Bulldozer or Robert Chumming, explored notions of perception and vision, creating explicitly false illusions for the camera [22]. Another photographer known for his use of combination printing is so-called "master of the composite image" American Jerry Uelsmann who significantly refers to the photomontage technique as "post-visualization" because for him "the moment of creativity does not take place the instant the shutter of the camera is released, but rather later - in the darkroom" (Uelsmann: HREF). As Newhall states "Uelsmann combines disparate images to produce strange, often disquieting and ambivalent compositions such as the face/fist in Symbolic Mutations (see figure 12 and Newhall, 1982: 288). However, it needs to be pointed that the work of these artists present us with more than a simple true/false dichotomy. Their work seeks to create realities that are more meaningful than the one literally given to the eye and if one consider for instance Heartfield's photomontages of Hitler, one can realize that in their essences these composites are truer than propaganda pictures. Put simply, tampering with a photograph does not necessarily mean that the obtained result is false.

Photo-manipulation and Politics

Nevertheless, as we have seen in the first chapter, political institutions helped develop the belief that photography was offering a faithful representation of reality. Once this belief had been ingested by the masses and the faith in the photographic image was near absolute, the medium became a powerful instrument of propaganda in the hands of totalitarian governments. As John Berger writes in About Looking: "The very 'truthfulness' of the medium encouraged its deliberate use as a means of propaganda" (Berger 1980: 52-3).
As historians have revealed, old manner manipulations have been casually used in the past to retouch, cut out or rearrange politicians to conform the political agenda of the time and place [23]. However, many examples of doctored political photographs come from Soviet propaganda. Back then, techniques of retouching were performed not only to enhance the appearance of the country's leaders, but also, more importantly, to "erase" someone's existence from history [24]. The most famous example of this kind of "Stalinist retouching" might be the historical shot of Lenin's May 5, 1920 address to the troops. In the original photograph, Lenin addresses the soldiers from a wooden podium while Trotsky and Kamenev stand on the right of the podium. Later, under Stalin's regime, the picture was reissued with a bit of retouching and without the two conspicuous figures (see figure 13). Stalin did not want to have Trotsky associated with the Bolshevik revolution, so he "rewrote" history with a brush and ink (King, 1997: 66-73). The same technique was used to get rid of Gregory Nelyubov, one of the nation's earliest cosmonaut trainees, from official records. Nelyubov had his face smudged and cropped out, and was completely erased from all space shots and group shots in 1961, after he had a run-in with the police. Similarly, twenty years later, when the Soviet Union wanted to downplay the military's role in the Soviet space program, they eliminated Soviet missile chief Charlie S. Moskalenko from a photograph immortalising the first launch of man into space, in which he originally appeared in military attire between cosmonaut Yore Gagarin and rocket expert Sergei Korolev (Life, 1986: 67-8). Alexander Dubcek, Czech Prime Minister and progressive leader of a "communism with a human face," received the same fate. He "vanished" from a photograph showing him with President Svoboda in front of Saint Virus Church in Prague, after the Soviets had crushed his attempt at reform in 1968 (Rodgers, 1998: 114).

As a matter of fact, political regimes have made people disappear from photographs for years and almost every dictatorship has used the possibilities offered by the photographic medium to doctor or falsify pictures for propaganda purposes. However, doctoring of photographs is unfortunately not the privilege of totalitarian regimes and photo forgery was performed in "free" countries as well. Even though this is less documented, two political examples are often cited. The first involves a 1928 campaign picture of Herbert Hoover and his running mate which was faked because Hoover refused to pose with the vice-presidential candidate. The other well publicised case dates from the McCarthy era. In 1951, Maryland Democrat Senator Millard Tidings lost his seat after a composite showing him apparently conferring with Earl Browser, a head of the US Communist Party was published in Life (see figure 14).

Message without a Code?

This latter incident is mentioned and commented on by Roland Barthes in the section of his essay "The Photographic Message" devoted to manipulated photographs, or what he calls "trick photography [25]"and gives him the opportunity to determine the issues brought up by such processes. In this 1961 essay, Barthes examines the particular genre of press photography and attempts to establish a "structural analysis of the photographic message" (Barthes, 1977: 16). For the French cultural critic/semiologist/structuralist/poststructuralist, the photographic image "is a message without a code"; the only structure of information "that is exclusively constituted and occupied by a 'denoted' message" (Barthes, 1977: 17-8). However, as he first defines the structure of the photographic message as independent of the text and then discusses their interrelation Barthes reaches a somehow more complex answer.
In the section entitled "The photographic paradox," Barthes stresses photographs' two levels of meaning: the denotative and the connotative, an important distinction in semiology. While denotation relates to that which is "objectively" present in a sign, connotation is the meaning beyond the denotated, literal sign. As we have seen earlier, what Barthes calls the analogon of photography is the perfect representation of the object or person photographed, the referent. This perfect representation, the analogon, is the "denoted" aspect of the message or the non-coded aspect of the photographic meaning. However, photographs have also a "connoted" message which is "the manner in which the society, to a certain extent, communicates what it thinks of it" (Barthes, 1961: 17). Put simply, connotation relates to the cultural meaning which influences our reading of a photograph. According to Barthes, this dimension of meaning is not natural, but rather determined culturally, historically and ideologically. Furthermore, connotation implies interpretation, and the interpretation depends on the context in which the denoted signs appears. As Barthes sums it up: "The photographic paradox can be seen as the co-existence of two messages, the one without a code (the photographic analogue), the other with a code (the 'art,' or the treatment, or the 'writing', or the rhetoric, of the photograph)" (Barthes, 1977: 19). In this text Barthes also identifies six ways to impose connotative meaning upon a photograph: trick effects, pose, objects, photogenic, aestheticism, and syntax, which he calls "connotation procedures" (Barthes, 1961: 20). What interests Barthes in trick effects, is the fact that they "intervene without warning in the plane of denotation; they utilise the special credibility of the photograph - this, as was seen, being simply its exceptional power of denotation - in order to pass off as merely denoted a message which is in reality heavily connoted; in no other treatment does connotation assume so completely the 'objective' mask of denotation" (Barthes, 1961: 21). Manipulating a photograph therefore changes the connotative aspect of a photograph. Barthes explains the Life composite in the following way:

Naturally, signification is only possible to the extent that there is a stock of signs, the beginnings of a code. The signifier here is the conversational attitude of the two figures and it will be noted that this attitude becomes a sign only for a certain society, only given certain values. What makes the speaker's attitude the sign of a reprehensible familiarity is the tetchy anti-Communism of the American electorate; which is to say that the code of connotation is neither artificial (as in a true language) nor natural, but historical (Barthes, 1961: 21-2).

However, as Barthes further explains in "The Photographic Message," another way to alter the meaning of a photograph has to do with the use of text. According to him, words come to "sublimate, patheticize, or rationalise the image" and text "loads the image" (Barthes, 1977: 25-6). In addition, Barthes observes that the effect of connotation varies with the distance of the text to the image: the closer words are to the image, the less they seem to connote it (Barthes, 1977: 26).
Text is an important component of a photograph since it is what gives the image most of its meaning, helping us comprehend what it depicts. Therefore, even though Barthes started by emphasising the assertion that a photograph is an encoded message, we can understand how connotative value is inescapable [26] . For Barthes, the capacity to understand a photograph's connotative value is based on "the reader's 'knowledge' just as though it were a matter of a real language"; and it will be "intelligible only if one has learned the signs" (Barthes, 1977: 28). Furthermre, given their purely denotative value, photographs' content can be drastically "rewritten." This versatile aspect of photographs is conveniently used by tabloids. For instance, a snapshot of a star mourning at a funeral, taken out of context and associated with an appropriate caption or commentary can become the visual proof that the star is in an unhappy relationship. On a more serious note, an exhibition in Paris, several years ago, demonstrated that point, showing thirty photographs from the First World War that had been (falsely) labelled and identified as documents from the Iran-Iraq war. None of the thousands of people who visited this exhibition questioned the images. The trick was only revealed in the last show room, where explanations on the different manipulations used were offered (Cajole, 1998: 26). In her book Photography and Society, Gisèle Freund examines several similar cases which happened in the French media in the sixties and seventies and claims that "the objectivity of the photograph is only an illusion. The captions to the image can change totally its signification" (Freund, 1974: 153). The importance of the caption has also been pointed out by Walter Benjamin. In his "A Short History of Photography," he predicted with a great vision its weight when he wondered: "Will not captions become the essential components of pictures?" (in Mitchell, 1992: 192). Moreover, as he writes in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:"

For the first time, captions have become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting. The directives which the captions give to those looking at pictures in illustrated magazines soon become even more explicit and more imperative in the film where the meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones (Benjamin, 1936: 226).

Therefore, photographic images are not as removed from written texts as is often thought [27] . Text, is essential to understand the content and the message of photographs.

Deconstructing Documentary Photography

Even the photo that most closely fulfils the conventions of standard realism is a "reasonable facsimile" of what the eye might have seen. — Kroker and Weinstein, Data Trash, 1994.

Even photographs which make direct claims to documentary truth are always constructed by the photographer to create symbolic images that can "provoke" viewers' interest. Many contemporary critics have exposed the construction behind documentary photographers' work. A good example of this is Dorothea Lange's (1895-1965) famous photograph, Migrant Mother (see figure 15). Taken in March 1936, in Nipomo, California, the photograph is a portrait of a thirty-two-year-old woman, Florence Thompson, and her children sheltered under a tent in a camp of migrant pea pickers, which, as it has been often noted, bears striking resemblance to a Madonna-with-child image. Over the years this image has become an icon of the Great Depression era [28] and one of the most reproduced in the world. However, some have argued that Lange's celebrated photograph had been carefully constructed in order to achieve a result that would comply with the FSA Project ideology. In Mind's Eye, Mind's Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered, historian James Curtis demonstrates how the enduring image was composed. According to him, "Lange did not arrive at this final composition by accident [...] but by patient experimentation with various poses [29]." To prove this, Curtis exposes the five other shots taken by Lange the same day and considers that the most well-known of them is actually the last of the series (see figure 16). This reveals an explicit political and ideological agenda behind the choice made to single out a particular picture.

Another highly controversial photograph is Associated Press Joe Rosenthal's 1945 Raising the flag on Iwo Jiwa (see figure 17). This photograph, which shows a groups of marines erecting a U.S. flag on a Japanese island after their victory, is also one of the most reproduced in the world and earned its author a Pulitzer's Price. Despite these impressive achievements, some have challenged the authenticity of the image claiming that it had been posed for the camera [30] (Mitchell, 1992: 42). It has to be noted here that "restaging [31] " has been at the center of a number of controversies. Based on such claims, the veracity of a lot of war photographs for instance has been challenged.
Documentary photographer Lewis Wickes Hine, in his essay "Social Photography," discusses the ambivalence of the photographic image. For Hine, on the one hand, "the average person believes implicitly that the photograph cannot falsify" because it "has an added realism of its own," "an inherent attraction not found in other forms of illustration." However, on the other hand, we should be aware that our "unbounded faith in the integrity of the photograph is often rudely shaken, for, while photographs may not lie, liars may photograph." As Hine remarks: "It becomes necessary, then, in our revelation of the truth, to see to it that the camera we depend upon contracts no bad habits" (in Stange, 1989: 86). As a result of these discussions on the realistic nature of documentary photography, later photographers, such as Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank with his series The Americans, a documentary of the United States published in 1959, began to acknowledge personal expression as part of their projects. In 1966, Life magazine challenged photographic "truth" in regard of the role of the photographer in "making" pictures, notably quoting from novelist and critic James Agree: "... It is doubtful whether most people realize how extraordinarily slippery a liar the camera is. The camera is just a machine, which records with impressive and as a rule very cruel faithfulness precisely what is in the eye, mind, spirit and skill of its operator to make its record" (Life, 1966: 7). The editors then noted that "the image reflects the man who snatches it" and recognized that it is "entirely possible for a skilled photographer to twist truth to his liking."
As André Rouillé writes in the conclusion of A History of Photography: Social and Cultural Perspectives: "We can see the erosion of the myth of the photographer-reporter devoted to the ideal of representing the unvarnished truth, even at the cost of his life [...] Press photography which used to claim to be a way of knowing the world and life, can now be seen for what it is: a source of illusory, subjective, sometimes misleading images [...] As the photographic image increasingly reveals itself to be not so much a true copy of reality but a metaphor of it, documentary photography and art photography cease to be considered irreconcilable" (Rouillé, 1987: 255-6).
In this regard, the work of Mexican "traditional photographer [32] and digital-age dialectician" Pedro Meyer is interesting. In his collection of digitally-altered photographs entitled Truths & Fictions, he calls into question the photographic image as documentary truth. Moreover, he shows photographs as the construction they are and reminds the viewers that photographers are storytellers and they should not trust their eyes (Rosenberg, 1995: HREF). For Baudrillard, Meyer's work would be a perfect example of his notion of "simulation" since his images mimic the real without trying to replace it. As Meyer explains in his book Truth & Fictions: "All my images are about documenting experiences - not fabricating them" (Meyer and Fontcuberta, 1995: 108). Furthermore, he argues that the fact that his images are digital "doesn't make them any less truthful than documentary photographs of the past" (Howorth and Scanlon, 1993: 82). As the literature describing his 1993 exhibition states: "Meyer has produced a new body of seamless digital photo-graphs that are at once documentary fictions and digital truths" (Enyeart: HREF).

Challenging the automatic characteristic of photography

Finally, as we have seen in the first chapter, it has often been argued (Barthes, Sontag, Cavell, Arnheim) that the claim for truth of the photographic medium is directly linked to its mechanical aspect. This position has been questioned by many critics. For instance, Joel Snyder and Neil Walsh Allen argument in "Photography, Vision, and Representation" that the "automatic" character of photography has been highly exaggerated. As they argue in their essay, even when no process such as retouching or photographic "trickery" is used, technically the camera offers a wide range of manners to alter the meaning of a photograph. Any photographer, from the "Sunday snapshooter" to the professional, "makes a number of characterization" intentionally or not, through "his choice of equipment and how he uses it" (Snyder and Allen, 1975: 150).
As a matter of fact, some very efficient ways to alter the message conveyed by an image, indeed, do not require neither darkroom work, nor a computer: the simple selection of an image amongst the many at the disposition of photo editors already implies subjectivity as we have seen with the example of Dorothea Lange's series Migrant Mother. Another efficient way to convey a different perspectives to viewer can be found through reframing; as David Shenk points out, "cropping alone is a powerful tool" because it edits what we can see and influences our awareness of a particular event (Shenk, 1997: HREF). Moreover, photographs' meaning can be altered through stage direction by the photographer at the shooting stage, the camera position, choice of filters or by using a different range of lens width. John Henshall explains how lenses can affect the final image:

The choice of a wide angle lens exaggerates perspective and consequently affects perception of the relative sizes of objects in the frame. A long focal length lens makes objects appear closer together than they are. A wide aperture reduces depth of field to the point where attention can be directed to the in-focus part of the image. A low camera angle accentuates the stature of subjects, allowing them to dominate us; a high camera angle enables us to dominate the subject (Henshall, 1998: HREF).

As a result, a close-up on a group of eight or ten persons can either suggest a crowd or "erase" the crowd around the main person. This technique was used by Poland's official media in 1979 when the Pope made his first visit to the country. By focusing on John Paul II and the nuns around him, the photographers virtually left out of the picture the hundreds of thousands people who had gathered around him, diminishing its impact but complying with the political directives of the Polish government (Huriet, 1998: HREF). Given these possibilities, one has to acknowledge that Berger's statement that photography "cannot lie because it prints directly" seems much less plausible.
Finally, it needs to be pointed out here that if some photographs are intentionally manipulated to convey a certain message, sometimes mysterious apparitions, interpreted as ghosts or other paranormal phenomena, are only the result of photography artifacts. The New England Skeptical Society Encyclopedia of Skepticism and the Paranormal, details many opportunities for mistakes to be made, should it be by the camera operator, the developer or the camera manufacturer. For example, one of the most common procedures, flashback, happens when a flash used is too bright so that the reflected light creates hazy overexposed areas on the film. The camera cord itself can look like a streak of light if it falls in front of the lens once the picture is developed (DeAngelis, 1996: HREF). These technical tricks also contradict the purely mechanical aspect of the camera.

Chapter three »

Notes

14. It has to be remembered that the length of exposures of the first daguerreotypes did not allow portraits and several technical improvements had to be made before portrait studios could open their doors to men and women, eager to be immortalized by the camera. [back]

15. As Walter Benjamin remarks in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:" "It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face" (Benjamin, 1936: 226). [back]

16. The introduction of the carte-de-visite format by Frenchman André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri, a photographer to the court of Napoleon III, in 1854, contributed to popularize portrait photography. As a result of its relative affordability, the new format became a craze overnight. It needs also to be noted here that Disdéri might have been the first theorist of portrait photography. In 1862, he published a book on the topic entitled Esthetic of Photography (Freund, 1974: 69). [back]

17. Tinted photographs have a single overall color resulting from the addition of dyes to the photographic materials by a commercial manufacturer. They do not require the photographer's manipulation contrarily to hand-colored photographs (Baldwin, 1991: 80). [back]

18. It needs to be noted that most photographers found the practice "detestable and costly" to quote Gaspard Félix Tournachon, better known as Nadar, one of the most famous portraitists of the nineteenth century (in Newhall, 1982: 70). [back]

19. As Beaumont Newhall explains: "The silver iodide emulsions of the time were sensitive only to the blue rays of the spectrum and those that lay beyond. It was impossible to photograph objects that only red or green: a very bright red flag with a green cross upon it appeared totally black in a print" (1982: 73). As a result, landscapes with skies were an almost impossible challenge. [back]

20. Other prominent artists who used the principle include notably Henry Peach Robinson who first became famous with his Fading Away, a combination print showing a dying young woman with her parent grieving (see figure 9), but also British photographer David Octavious Hill (1802-1870) who produced many collages or John Morrissey who used an even simpler method to construct his composite pictures, simply rephotographing ready-made pictures that he would first cut out and paste together against a specially prepared background (Ades, 1986: 7). [back]

21. The "cut and paste" principle, perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the computer age, allows the user to select data from a text, an image or even a video, to copy it and paste it in another document. All this in a matters of seconds. [back]

22. For a more in-depth examination of this issue, I direct the reader to Graham Clarke's chapter entitled "The Photograph Manipulated" in his book The Photograph (pp. 187-206). [back]

23. For examples of falsifications of political photographs, I recommend Alain Jaubert's remarkable Making People Disappear: An Amazing Chronicle of Photographic Deception (McLean, VA: Pergamon-Brassey International Defense Publishers, 1989), in which techniques of photographic manipulation of historical records are described and David King's The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997), which focuses on the practices of "the Kremlin airbrushers" under Stalin. [back]

24. If this technique is common to photography, it is interesting to note that the idea of erasing or adding people to "rewrite" history has always been around, long before the appearance of the camera. In ancient Rome for instance, the parallel desire to efface the trace of a person's existence from history was called a damnation memoriae. In a similar spirit, Jacques-Louis David's famous 1805 painting The Coronation of Napoleon, features, at the request of the emperor, people who did not attend the ceremony. [back]

25. Barthes writes the following regarding the composite: "Tricks effects. A photograph given wide circulation in the American press in 1951 is reputed to have cost Senator Millard Tydings his seat; it showed the Senator in conversation with the Communist leader Earl Browder. In fact the photograph had been faked, created by the artificial bringing together of the two faces" (Barthes, 1961: 21). [back]

26. Barthes concluded his essay noting that "pure denotation" in the photograph exists only on the level of the traumatic image. In Camera Lucida, Barthes retains his concept of the traumatic image, but transforms his earlier terms "denotation" and "connotation" into the terms "punctum" and "studium." [back]

27. Roland Barthes, in his book on the semiotics of fashion, Système de la mode, also writes about the significance of the caption (New York : Hill and Wang, 1983). [back]

28. In 1972, Roy Stryker, the head of the FSA Project, described the picture in the following terms: "When Dorothea took that picture, that was the ultimate. She never surpassed it. To me, it was the picture of Farm Security" (in Rosler, 1989: 315). [back]

29. In a 1960 essay for Popular Photography entitled "The Assignment I'll Never Forget," Lange gave the following account of the experience: "I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it" (in Newhall, 1980: 262-5). [back]

30. However, it is worth noting that according to Paul Martin Lester, "the confusion over the authenticity of the famous photograph" is based on the fact that there was another shot of the event, featuring the soldiers "smiling and waving for the camera under the same flag." When a reporter asked Rosenthal if the image was posed, the photographer, thinking that he was referring to this other shot, (too) casually admitted that it was and later confirmed that the famous photograph was genuine (Lester, 1988: HREF). [back]

31. Restaging is the action of re-creating a situation or an event that actually happened for the camera. [back]

32. Meyer's first CD-ROM compilation, I Photograph to Remember (1991), was for instance an example of traditional photojournalism: a collection of black-and-white pictures of the last year of his parents' lives (Howorth and Scanlon, 1993: 82). [back]