The curator’s eye is cultivated to look at things differently. The curator is an aesthetician, someone deeply concerned with the nature and beauty of things. Show a curator pictures from the daily newspaper and they may scoff. Photojournalism, they may say, is not art. The response a curator may have to news images is not necessarily informed entirely by the beauty of the subject, but by the motivations and ideologies behind them.
The museum curator might look upon news pictures as craft or kitsch rather than as art because many times there is a sense that creator of the image has been denuded from the process. Journalism, especially photojournalism, alleges a position of neutrality that compromises and often confounds the ways in which we look at the world through images.
The recent manipulation of images in the news, and all the criticism that goes along with it, supports the idea that if pictures are altered, for whatever reason, they lose the pretext of neutrality as reportage by entering the realm of abstraction. Needless to say, the implications of this shift become not only an epistemological issue but an ontological problem as well. There is a difference here between ways of knowing (epistemology) and ways of being (ontology) is significant to point out here.
I believe we, as consumers of images – artistic or not – are adjusting sociologically to an array of technological innovations which significantly impinge on visual practice. The ways in which electronic digital photo editing and digital photography impinge on how see and act toward the world go far beyond professional practice.
The real shift in the metaphysics of understanding how we see and know things is being challenged every day as average folk pick up the digital happy snap to capture the baby’s first steps or cut into a delicious birthday cake. The more people assimilate to digital culture in terms of manipulating photos in and out of the camera, the greater the tolerance of ambiguity emerges around long-standing acceptable standards and practices. The stink professionals are making today about conforming to zero-tolerance policies on digital alteration may mean very little to the general public when this sort of practice becomes commonplace.