Dennis Dunleavy

When words fail to communicate

photo credit: AFP/ Saul Loeb

So much information is revealed in the human face. Loeb's patience with the moment, usually just a shin plaster assignment, is an excellent example of foreground/background juxtaposition. In this case, Schwarzenegger's expression, so carefully framed behind Bush, suggests more than the typical media speak hit and run. There is something in the tension of Schwarzenegger's eyes that is captured arrestingly here. There is a honesty in the glance that conveys more than words could ever express.
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Even Extremists Use Photoshop: Osama bin Laden's makeover

Photo Credit: AP via As-Sahab

It appears that Osama bin Laden's propagandists have been taking some Photoshop lessons lately.

Typically, over the past few years, Bin Laden's screen shots have been less than aesthetically interesting or eye-catching.

Now, as the extremist continues his war of words against all-things capitalistic, especially America, there's someone cleaning up his image, complete with feathered knock-outs and dynamic new background colors. Instead of bin Laden's usual mountain gorilla look, his publicists are now busy photoshopping him to appear other-worldly and prophet-ish.

In some ways, it might be concluded that either bin Laden's stature among his followers is gaining ground, or that his political operatives are finding it increasingly necessary to elevate him through visual representations that make him appear more holy and dignified. Either way, it is curious to consider the sophistication of techniques used to sway opinion and project an increasingly mythic and metaphorical likeness of the figure over time.

Seam carving and the slippery slope of visual veracity

Technological innovative appears to be out pacing our capacity to understand and maintain some of the conventions inextricably bound to the  ethics of photography, especially photojournalism.

Researchers Ariel Shamir and Shai Avidan have figured out a way of reducing and enlarging the size of images that they describe as content-aware seam carving. The process allows the Photoshop user to extend pixels in one dimension while reducing them in another, which is much different from antecedent resizing methods.

Photo Credit: Shamir & Avidan

In other words, it is now possible to resize an image while maintaining the scale of the most important features in the picture. Shamir and Avidan call the process the "judicious" reduction or expansion of pixels along along a seam. The seam carving program repeatedly carves out and inserts seams along a path of connected pixels.

Photo Credit: Shamir & Avidan

It shouldn't come as a surprise that smart people like Shamir and Avidan are coming up with new ways of changing the content of our pictures to suit tastes and aesthetics after the fact. At the same time, technological innovation give us something to think about in terms of how fast these changes are occurring.

We are increasingly moving into an era where post-production processes such as seam carving determine our ability to discern how we come to decide what is deceptive and unethical. 

Diversions and Decisive Moments

It's the end of the fall soccer season at the YMCA, the geese are on the wing, and there's a lot of pumpkins getting carved up around here. Here are a few pictures I made this weekend for fun.

Photographs remind of us of the rituals associated with the passage of time.

Fall sports, like pumpkin carving, are also a big part of our cultural and social rituals.

Newspaper promotes photo digital manipulation with readers

The Boston Globe is encouraging readers to send in Photoshopped versions of their favorvite Red Sox players for publication on its Website. Dozens of poster-type images have been e-mailed to the Globe and then posted Online. All in good fun? I guess.

The bigger issue here is that in an age of questioning the credibility and authenticity of digital images, especially in journalism, why shouldn't the newspaper think twice about promoting the practice of photo fakery?

Encouraging the public to rip-off copyright protected images from the Internet and then digitally manipulate them does very little to help people understand the importance of intellectual property rights as well as ethics in a digital age.

The Globe has been careful to make sure it covers itself though. According to a notice on the submission page, the Globe reminds readers that they must have the appropriate permission to use any of the artwork submitted and that the work is original.

By submitting your Photoshop image(s) to Boston.com, you agree that such Photoshop image(s) and the accompanying information will become the property of Boston.com and you grant Boston.com permission to publicly display and use the Photoshop image(s) in any form or media for any and all purposes. You also warrant that (i) the Photoshop image is your original work, or is properly licensed, and does not violate the copyright or any other personal or property right of any third party, and (ii) you have obtained any and all releases and permissions necessary for our use. Your submission also allows Boston.com to edit, crop or adjust the colors of the image(s) on an as needed basis.

This raises the issue of what constitutes a copyright violation when the creator is appropriating other images to construct a collage.

It's highly unlikely that the creator of this Photoshop masterpiece actually owns the rights to the faces of the ballpayers in the collage. Therefore, it appears that the newspaper must be viewing the submitted work as illustrations and not pictures composed of multiple works that are copyright protected.

All in all, the practice of encouraging readers to take material off the Web and alter it, speaks to the slippery slope we are traveling on in terms of not only the veracity of what is seen, but of how really easy it is to manipulate how we see it.

Photojournalism is not anthropology

Today, I visited anthropologist Anne Chambers and we started talking about the differences between anthropology and photojournalism. She asked if photojournalists were reflexive? In sociology, reflexivity refers to a process where the observer steps back to examine the causes and effects of a relationship.  What Anne wanted to know was whether photojournalists took the time to understand what the act of producing pictures would mean for them as well as for their subjects prior to the act of making images.

My gut reaction to the question was that reflexivity in photojournalism is a luxury and a distraction from simply getting the job done. Stopping to think about the cause and effect or consequences, in many situations, would interfere with the role the photographer plays in terms of capturing events as they occur. In reality, however, reflexivity is heavily context dependent. There are times, for example, when photojournalist are very much engaged in pondering the impact of what they do. Photojournalists, as a group, are a conscientious group of individuals who understand social responsibility is and what it means to be committed to accurate and fair-minded visual reportage.

The biggest difference between anthropologists and photojournalists is more likely one of constraints and limitations. The methods of collecting or capturing human experiences, for photojournalists, is largely determined by deadlines and the inherent role of agenda setting in the news business. Like nurses, doctors, firefighters, and police officers, photojournalists have to suspend emotional engagement and reactions in order to deal with the trauma they witness. Anthropologists, on the other hand, spend long periods of time documenting and engaging with the peoples they seek to understand. There is, in this sense, more opportunity for reflexivity.

Common ground between anthropologists and photojournalists in terms of reflexivity, however, may be observed in the works of people like Mary Ellen Mark, Eugene Richards, and Jim Goldberg. Social documentary photography, of this sort, encourages a great deal more reflexivity than daily newspaper or even magazine photography.

Is teaching photography obsolete?

Today, technology is making teaching the fundamentals of photography ever more complicated.

Sound a bit incredulous?

Fledgling photographers now rely almost entirely on the "auto-everything" features built into cameras. "Just tell me what button to push," a beginning photo student once asked.

With auto focus, auto exposure, auto image stabilizer, auto ISO settings, auto red-eye reducer, and a myriad of other features at our disposal, it's easy to think of photography as an increasingly mechanistic process -- one that is determined almost entirely by predetermined algorithms. Camera makers are already adding features to correct our compositions as well – something with a programmed voice telling us when to move left, right, up or down, or, when we are too close, when to use flash, or when to stop bouncing around.

While the technology allows us to feel more productive and have a greater percentage of pictures turn out fairly well, we must also consider where the rush to resolve our technical incompetencies is taking us.

Camera manufacturers are pitching things such as a Kodak's Smart Scene mode, Nikon's Best Shot Selector, D-Lighting, a One-Touch Portrait mode, Live View mode, built-in digital voice recorders, and even Canon's 45-point high density Area auto focus system.

With all this technology to do the work for us, why do we need teachers? Isn't it possible to simply pick up a camera and start making pictures -- lots of them -- without having to learn how it all works?

Digital photography appears to be keeping pace with our "get more now" culture -- one that is obsessed with immediate gratification.  Unfortunately, this means that when we get what we want and we get it when we want it, we begin to lose our appreciation for the vitality and ritual of the image-making process. So much of our capacity to understand the complexities of the times in which we live require deeper insight and reflection. Yet, digital technologies, although beneficial in so many ways, seem determined to subvert this need for concentration and self-reflection.

In other words, digital technologies may make it even harder for us to sharpen our faculties of observation, imagination and interpretation.

This is where teaching must fit in. Beyond the technologies, photography must continue to evolve as a means for defining “the real” with authenticity and compassion. Teachers must continue to promote making connections, at the highest levels of human consciousness, between emotions and intellect in ways in which we see as well as the ways in which we make the things we see.

In this way the teaching of photography will not become a victim of technological determinacy.

Instead, we must challenge ourselves to examine and redefine how we understand the interstice between productivity and creativity in our image-consciousness culture. We must become increasingly aware of the influences brought into play by the advances of technology so as to not lose the significance that ritual interaction has on humanity.

Pictures, without context and pictures without compassion, are just pictures.

The true value of images in society is that they provide the emotional glue for sustaining the collective memories of our every day existence. From this perspective, it would be difficult to find these capabilities all rolled-up into a fancy auto-everything package.

Conditions of Knowing and Pictures on the Mind

Lately, I've really been struggling with how conditions of knowing relate to the pictures we see in our day to day world.

I am curious about why some images "stick" in our memory, while others do not. I am also fascinated by how images trigger specific emotional responses -- how they shape our cognitive, cultural, social and historical sense of place and being.  How are human beings culturally and historically conditioned to interpret pictures when they often extend beyond the original occurrence? How do we understand our collective past when so many images become  embedded in our visual and emotional memory?

The redactive and over-simplifying nature of the visual appears to be an intuitive process. The visual memory that we appropriate of our experiences on earth is a mix of cognitive and socio-cultural interactions. 

When Frederick Franck went off into the jungles of Africa to work with Albert Schweitzer in the 1950s, he was hoping that the camera he had brought with him would faithfully record and document his experiences. He was hoping that the memories of his time in Africa would never fade, and that he could someday share those memories with others. However, Franck soon abandoned his "memory box" and picked up a sketch pad and pencil instead. Why? What pushed Franck away from making photographs, an art form reputed to be our mirror of reality?

What Franck perceived, even 60 years ago, was the encroaching tide of the visual in society. In a visual environment such as the one we live with today, Franck predicted a world that would overload "our switchboards with noise."  The "switchboard"  Franck is referring constitutes our capacity for memory and emotions.  "We do a lot of looking: we look through lenses, telescopes, television tubes .... Our looking is perfected every day -- but we see less and less."

Today, we are constantly in a mental state of distraction as we bounce from one visual medium to another. The switchboard is on overload with no operators on duty. W.J.T. Mitchell, in his book Picture Theory, wrestled with this issue in writing about "narrative, memory, and slavery." Memory for Mitchell, within a contemporary context, views the process as "an aspect of private consciousness." Pictures as visual narratives possess a sense of temporal sequencing that are stored in the brain and recalled with necessary. The visual snapshots we carry around in our heads (memories), are emotionally biased, because we are conditioned by our experiences.

This brings us to a blog launched last June by Robert Hariman and John Lucaites called NO CAPTION NEEDED.

Hariman and Luciates offer analysis of images as they enter the switchboard of public consciousness. The authors are regarded highly in the field of visual rhetoric and the blog serves as a tool for many of their ideas and thoughts.

Photo Fibs

Rob Pegoraro, a Washington Post technology columnist, has some words to say about how innovations in digital photography is making it increasingly easier to make pictures that look better than reality.

The author contends that some of the new digital cameras on the market today can automatically correct problems that used to take more time and more skill to accomplish. Basically, modern cameras have digital deception built into them.

We now have available to us automatic "portrait enhancers", "slimming modes," and "red-eye reducers." For Pegoraro, "This kind of photo fakery ..... also fits in with the overall evolution of digital cameras."

From a sociological perspective, contemporary culture -- one that seeks out  ideal notions of beauty, compulsive perfectionism and an appetite for self-indulgence -- has created a demand for such feel-good contrivances. We are now capable of creating new likenesses that differ from reality. We can create and maintain resemblances that might makes us appear slimmer and younger may improve how we feel about ourselves, but in reality it's all about the smoke and mirrors of digital bits and bytes.

Votojournalism: Visual Spin from Stumpurbia

Techpresident.com, a blog tracking the online activities of presidential wannabees, offers a glimpse into how the social web is increasingly influencing the political process in this country.

One fascinating aspect to this site is a space dedicated to pictures using the Flickr photo-sharing site. If a picture is tagged with a candidates name, Techpresident links to it. In other words, if you are a campaign rally, all the images you upload to Flickr could have the potential to influence public perception of a candidate. It's a new twist on spin from stumpurbia.

Credit: Photo by Alex Witkowicz on Flickr

What makes this site significant is how it is using the phrase "Votojournalism" to refer to citizen photojournalism. As the site explains:

'We call it "votojournalism" because it is a prime example of voter generated content, photojournalism by the people."

According to the corporate web consultancy firm iDionome,  votojournalism is “The excellent portmanteau of Voter and Photojournalism, for voter-generated content where users post pictures of the candidates on the campaign trail, online.”

Techpresident's pitch offers an alternative to the professional spin applied to typical media coverage of a candidate's life during a campaign. As the pitch reads:

"You'll find lots of candid shots here, including those of people attending campaign events, along with the presidentials in sometimes unguarded moments."

The reach of the media spotlight on candidates is now expanding exponentially with the possibilities of the Internet and the social web. Anyone with a camera phone is potentially a "votojournalist", looking to catch that one decisive "tell-all" moment that may influence a candidate's chances to become president.

Although this activity may be beneficial for democracy -- now have more "eyes" than ever before scrutinizing the political process -- we also must be  careful not to fall for the redactive nature of photography. The concern here is that the torrent of images we have to deal with on a daily basis tends to reduce complex events into bytes and bits. In turn, an unvetted and relentless stream of images appears intimidating and overwhelming for many people to process. Or, in other words, our visual memory banks is in danger of running over. Votojournalism, then, is creating another visual memory stream for people to contend with in the complex history of the political process. Our visual memory of events is altered by a relentless stream of image -- images that simplify and reduce the complexities of our times to an informational/representational system that appears increasingly biased and unvetted.

At the same time, the burden of responsibility falls to the consumer to not be sucked into the potential for abuse by propagandists, spin doctors, and unscrupulous people with a flair for Photoshop. As Washington Post writer Jose Antonio Vargas reports, “For months now, there's been a disconnect between the campaign that's being waged offline and the one fought online. And the digital divide is only one part of that gulf. Political support and political fundraising don't match up on the Web either.”

This unvetted stream of "votojournalism" is not only exciting to see develop but it inevitably creates enormous challenges for its competition, the mainstream media.

In fact, we can assume the coming reality will be that a "votojournalist"  or anyone on the campaign staff or close to a candidate will actually have much better access than many of their professional counterparts in the mainstream media. The level of access afforded a votojournalist, with the camera and the Internet, may actually have the advantage of scooping accredited news sources . 

While many professional photojournalists find themselves penned into some highly controlled media staging area, others, particularly supporters with a ticket to $1,000-a-plate fund raiser will have free reign and access to make pictures and upload as nauseum.

The photo-op is now moving away from the high theatrics of stage management and is becoming a primary "free-for-all" conduit for pictures and video --  inevitably ending up on sites like Flickr, MySpace, or Facebook.

It follows, then, that these same images will make there way into the mainstream press under some auspicious byline called "submitted photo."