Dennis Dunleavy

Nuances of Digital Photography: Too new to trust?

Associated Press Internet writer Anick Jesdanun reports on how researchers are still developing ways to spot digital photo manipulation. Jesdanun points out how much of the media is concerned with an declining credibility in the veracity of photography since new technologies make it so easy to decieve viewers.

Comparing presidential candidates to technology

When the New York Times' Noam Cohen compared presidential candidates Barack Obama to a MacIntosh and Hillary Clinton to a PC, some sort of surrealistic line had been crossed. Comparing candidates to technology signifies a rhetorical control of images and language seeking to establish distinction and difference.

New York Times Illustration

The comparison also plays into the notion that candidates, like computers, are branded with distinct identities.  Branding either Obama as a Mac or Clinton as a PC trivializes the more substantive issues emerging from the campaigns. The writer could have just as well compared Obama to a convertible sportster and Clinton to mini van. Rhetorically, the comparisons become a shift in agency from issues to personalities.      

Ritual in a digital world

The act of making a picture validates our experiences, construct memory, and in turn, our rituals, beliefs, values, and attitudes toward the things we value and cherish in life.

At home, digital cameras range from camera phones, point and shoot, and DSLR. There are no expectations that the children should pick any of them up and make pictures, but it is just like having a piano in the living room. If cameras become part of a child's day to day experience, the act of picture making seems normal, even if it means photographing  his breakfast. The point here is that photographic rituals are embedded in routine. Making pictures inhabit us.

Pleasing the master: Deception revealed

An article in the The Wall St. Journal this week offers more evidence of how technologies have influenced photographic behaviors. The ability to create pictures than alter the truth is increasingly a global concern. In China, an award-winning image of rare Tibetan antelopes galloping  below a high-speed train is causing a storm of controversy not only in the journalistic community but also with environmentalists who see the deception as a part of a broader pattern of government propaganda.

Photo Credit: Liu Weiqing/Xinhua/Wall St. Journal


Photo Credit: Wall St. Journal

It is easy to pass off digital manipulation as isolated cases promulgated by ambitious and unethical photographers, but the issue may be symptomatic of a world-deterioration in the value of promoting ethical standards in journalism. This may also coincide with the public's inability to detect images that have been manipulated. As with other recent cases of digital manipulation, many editors, and by extension audiences, are forced to trust the source of an image's authenticity. The problem may reside in an individual's conviction to see the harm in what they might consider to be the little "white lie" in "fixing" pictures. Manipulated images give us, in other words, what we desperately want to see. We want to see a perfect drama of the human condition at arm's length or the classic tension between nature and human progress. As long as the demand for perfection outweighs truthful and fair-minded reportage, reality will continued to be subsumed.

Thank you Thomas Seymat for the link to this story.

Play by play: The social function of news images

Photo Credit: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

Pictures have weight -- sometimes they crush. The social function of news images reside not only
in their capacity to inform, but also in their ability to entertain. In our increasingly visual culture, pictures must draw and hold the viewer's attention.  Perhaps it is for this reason that editors believe pictures must be packaged and repackaged for us.

The social function of news images is grounded in the rhetoric of persuasion. Just as a lawyer may seek to sway a jury to his or her side of an argument, a picture, through its variety of visual cues, establishes a context of understanding that shapes perception and constructs a sense of reality.

The analysis:

"Mr. Clemens" -- the subject -- the sign -- in soft-focus foregrounding leads the eye upward to a carefully framed center of Mr. Clemens. 

Pictures, as David Fleming (1996)  eloquently contends, cannot be in and of themselves seen as arguments, but inevitably they seem to be able to cause a few.

The pictures freezes, frames and fixes in our memory a moment in time that can conjure up other memories. With the stoppage of time the persuasive determinacy of the picture emerges. Pictures may be a species of rhetoric, as Susan Sontag (2003) claims, for the very real sense that they appear before us as rational and orderly entities of time.

In this case, Clemens' testimony before Congress on steroid use may bring to mind other high-profile hearings such as in Iran-Contra with Oliver North or Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas'  appointment to the Supreme Court.  The low camera angle is iconic in that it produces  a recognizable perception in which the subject is made to appear larger-than-life.

The camera angle is not trivial or a trick since it modifies our sense of a normal eye-line match. In other words, speaking in terms of grammar, the camera angle acts like an adverb -- it modifies the subject.  Further, the sign, in this case, "Mr. Clemens,"  is indexical and points toward formality, courtesy and solemnity. The gesture is wholly symbolic. Clemens' look away from those questioning him, his raised hand suggesting defense.  In addition, the essential framing of Clemens with his pseudo-archangelic lawyers. The gestures of  Clemens' lawyers speak  louder than words. Here we have the million-dollar pitcher in the proverbial "hot seat" and is million-dollar lawyers act as his intellectual bodyguards.

As mentioned earlier, news images function to both inform and entertain, but the real objective of making pictures is to make us think. Any object in the world, and pictures are objects, that can make us think about bigger ideas and issues can't be all that bad.  We shouldn't have to settle for someone else's interpretation of the world if what is represented only serves to reinforce a status quo. The ultimate objective of a news image should not only be to serve us a preconceived packaged reality, but to wrestle with convention and conscience.

The evidence:

Recently, this point was brought home on the Magnum photo site when Christopher Anderson's bare-bulb approach to photographing presidential candidate Mitt Romney came under fire from some viewers.  Anderson's approach was the "anti-photo op." Tired of making the same stale and banal images that most of the press pack gets of the candidates, Anderson blasted Romney through what appears to be a rain-splattered lens.


Click to go to Magnum's Picture of the Week

In his defense Anderson commented:

These events are rather ridiculous. they are staged and repetitive....It was a conscious decision to flash with this technique. It is as if throwing too much light on it might somehow expose these campaign photo ops for what the really are. The designers of these events want us to make a pretty picture. but a pretty picture to me felt like something that would be false to this event. I almost thought of the flash as being like an xray that would reveal what I really see at an event like this.

Anderson brings up one of the biggest challenges faces photojournalism today -- mediocrity. If news images do not seek to edify they run risk of becoming nothing more than someone else's spin. What we are tasked with here is to understand the relationship between the art of making news pictures and the larger implications of how these pictures function in society.

Picturing the emotional candidate

An inordinate amount of attention is being paid to Hillary Clinton's emotions these days as people search for ways to separate her and her Democratic contender, Barack Obama.

Headlines recounting Clinton's emotions such as,  "For Crying Out Load: Hillary Turns on the Tears Again", "Hillary's Crying Campaign: The Tears of a Clown" and "Hillary Clinton's Crocodile Tears," signify how gender bias impinges on this year's presidential campaign, at least on the Democratic side. Pictures showing Clinton wiping her eyes or attempting to control her emotions in front of the cameras continues to set off a media frenzy, with bloggers leading the way. 

Where is the substantive news value in repeatedly running pictures of the candidate rubbing her eyes or blowing her nose?  Are we to assume that an individual would not make a good president if they cannot control their emotions publicly?

It is difficult to say conclusively that coverage focusing on Clinton's emotional displays is having a negative impact on her chances to become the next president, but in a world that remains dominated mostly by men, it doesn't seem to be helping her all that much.

Photo Credit: Getty Images

Anthropologist Catherine Lutz notes that emotions are culturally constructed as signs of danger, irrationality, and weakness – characteristics commonly associated with women. Please note the term "culturally constructed" because this is where many of our interpretations come from.

When a picture captures the viewer’s attention, it puts into play cultural beliefs and values associated with gendered emotional displays. Some right wing media have jumped on Clinton for her emotional moments claiming that she is using tears to garner sympathy and votes.   New York magazine, for example, began an article about Clinton with the lead, "Yep, it's official. Hillary Clinton is running to be Crybaby-in-Chief," and The New York Post, not known to be overly kind to liberals, began their reportage with "It was another two-hanky day on the campaign trail yesterday, as Hillary Rodham Clinton teared up at an event targeting female voters on the eve of the Super Tuesday." elections."

Robinson (2002) suggests, “Most work on gender and emotion has stressed how a gendered rhetoric of emotional control reinforces women’s subordination within societies that privilege rationality, self-control, and the stable boundaries between interiority and exteriority that emotions appear to breach.” 

This may help explain how some media have turned on Clinton's outward expressions of emotion as a sign of weakness.  But, research describes emotion not only in terms of the physiological changes of an inner-self, but also as social, cultural and linguistic operator (see Catherine Lutz's research).

The two images shown here exemplify the antithesis of the “boys don’t cry” stoicism of the American male experience -- a domain which Clinton threatens to disrupt if she were to become president. The photographs suggest a turn away from American middle-class "emotional culture" promulgated by the belief that men, not women, are obligated to control emotions for the greater good of the country.

Cultural morays and beliefs are inextricably bound to emotion.  As Catherine Lutz argues, “Western discourse on emotions constitutes them as paradoxical entities that are both a sign of weakness and a powerful force.”  To show emotions makes the person experiencing feelings weaker or deficient in character.

Hillary Clinton is not only running for president  this year, she is challenging a male dominated paradigm which preconditions public performance and cultural outlook. Tears, in this case, threaten the stability of this paradigm because we believe that emotion is irrational and unstable. Could it be that the recesses of Hillary Clinton's inner life, through the pictures we see of her, undermine her opportunity to become our commander and chief.  Perhaps, in the end, America is not mature enough to handle an emotional presidency, since individuals who wear their hearts on their sleeves are often considered unfit to serve.   

Photo Contest Is a Referendum on the Human Conscience

I wrote another blog piece for Black Star Rising about Tim Hetherington's World Press Photo "Best of" picture. Some of the comments offered by the judges started to make me think about what this picture really means, culturally and politically.

There are the Paparazzi and then there is Rosa Photo

Photo Credit: Philadelphia Daily News

For more than 20 years, Rosa Photo has been selling pictures to immigrants outside the INS office in Philadelphia. Last week the Rosa Photo was hauled away by police after undercover officers discovered they could purchase false IDs from the entrepreneurs. There is an interesting article on this sideline business in photography that hardy gets any mention until something like this happens.

The last days of the Polaroid

Photo Credit: Eyetwist/Flickr

Long before digital photography, the Polaroid ruled the land of instant images. This year will mark the end of an era with the closing of Polaroid plants in the U.S. and overseas, as well as the discontinuation of Polaroid film. 

It appears that the historical significance of the Polaroid SX-70 and other cameras has been over shadowed by advances in digital photography. At the same time, the Polaroid's place between the latent and the instant cannot be underestimated.

World Press Photo of the Year: Exhausted Soldier

Photo Credit: Tim Hetherington

British photojournalist, Tim Hetherington has been awarded the World Press Photo of the Year for 2007. Hetherington's image shows a U.S. soldier resting in a bunker during combat in Afghanistan. Hetherington was on assignment for Vanity Fair magazine when he made the image. More than 5,019 photographers from 125 countries entered the contest this year  -- a record.

LIFE photographer Allan Grant dies

Photo Credit: Los Angeles Times

The Los Angles Times is reporting the death of Allan Grant,  a LIFE magazine photographer know for capturing the lives of the iconic and newsworthy of his day. Grant worked throughout the 1940s through the 1960s.

Pictures, Memories and Emotions

There is little doubt that pictures affect how we not only understand the world around us, but also how we feel about it. I have been wrestling with coming to terms with the relationship between pictures and memory. I think there is a connection between what we see and what we remember. It is the memories that are stirred up by a picture that trigger emotion. In turn, emotion is closely associated with beliefs, values and norms. From our beliefs we begin to act toward something. Since pictures can be emotionally charged objects, the individual processes feelings both subjectively and objectively.

I am thinking of John Moore's image of a man reacting to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. In the image, the man's outward expression of shock and disbelief is carefully framed symmetrically, with a tangle of mangled bodies on the ground behind him. If an image could sum up the emotion of grief, this one would do well. There is little ambiguity about this image, despite attempts by mainstream broadcast media to blur out the bloody bodies.

What memories does this image trigger for us?

Photo Credit: John Moore/Getty Images

Susan Sontag, in Regarding the Pain of Others, observes, "It seems that the appetite for showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked." Memories of the collapse of the World Trade Center and a century of countless images of calamities from around the globe come to mind. Memories, as Sontag suggests, alter the image, according to memory's need to confer emblematic status on things we feel worthy of remembering. The emotions associated with images depicting emotion are complex.  We may feel shame, fear, anxiety, disgust, anger, sadness, and remorse. But there is also another side to emotional control -- one that conjures up relief that such events as the Bhutto assassination do not occur in our neighborhood. There may also be feelings of alienation, disconnection and disbelief. Here we find the image to activate a memory-emotion-belief cycle. This cycle assumes   that for someone to experience an emotional response to an image there must be some value belief system behind it. We feel, because we believe in larger, more abstract and symbolic constructs, than physical pain. Belief systems underpin our emotional responses to the images we see. The norms and values we hold for ourselves and others are constructed by the cultural norms we share. We are taught that violence is wrong, yet wars and killing remain a reality. Images of violence do not seem to deter us. Media, from video games to Hollywood films continue to celebrate the objectification and degradation of the human body and spirit. How, then, could one picture -- such as the one John Moore has made -- move us from the belief that violence is wrong to a call for action?

This is a morally complex question since many people might argue that there is little or no connection between what we see and what we end up doing about what we see. At the same time, I believe that cultural norms are in a state of constant negotiation between the essential self and the social self. If more people took the time to reflect upon the values held closest to the center of who they think they are, the essential self, then, the possibility of changing our social self would emerge. The social self is the outward expression of who we present ourselves to be in our every day life -- who we think other people think we are. If we are truly moved in our essential self by an image to act, then our social self will change.

One way to think about the tensions between the essential and the social self is to consider symbolic behaviors. In Moore's picture, despite cultural, ethnic and religious differences, the symbolic behavior of grief and horror is clear to us. Pictures, as a visual language, transfer  symbolic behaviors across the cultural and linguistic barriers that often divide us. At the same time,  we remain divided and disharmonious species.

Unfortunately, the habitual ways we are conditioned to respond to violent image influences  our capacity to separate reality from fantasy and fiction. Our habituated ways of seeing, understanding, and acting, also impinge on our ability to respond emotionally to images depicting violence and suffering. Pictures are indeed a form of agency, they goad us to think and act out of the feelings that they conjure up for us. But our visual culture has become so saturated with such pictures that the capacity for images of violence to shock is diminished. As Sontag contends:

"Making suffering loom larger; by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to 'care' more; It also invites them to feel that the sufferings and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any local political intervention."

We live in a world where sentiment and emotion is exploited by external forces. How much control do we really have over our feelings? From this perspective, images desensitize our capacity for compassion. In this way our memories appear to fail us as we can longer distinguish between  essential experiences and socially constructed realities.

Blogs of Note: Black Star Rising and Southern Oregon University Today

I made another contribution to the Black Star Rising blog recently about the nature of photojournalism and the trend toward aesthetics over visual reportage.

Furthermore, I  started a photo blog about Southern Oregon University where I currently teach. I really enjoy making pictures of faculty and student activities and the blog gives me a good reason to get out on campus and meet new people.

The truth hurts: "Reality is a lie"

Photo Credit: New York Times

It was only a matter of time before an increasingly number of computer scientists began  wrapped their heads around digital imaging in a big way, at least in their spare time. That's exactly what Carlo Baldassi, a student in computational neuroscience did, after looking at some pictures of his girlfriend that appeared too constrained and out of proportion. Baldassi has created an automatic photo-editing software tool that always the user to stretch an image without it looking stretched. Peter Wayner's article in The New York Times quotes Baldassi as saying, "Reality is a lie." Nice quote perhaps, but the implications are much more far-reaching as software such as the one Baldassi has made becomes commonplace.

Wayner observes:

Automated tools like Mr. Baldassi’s are changing the editing of photography by making it possible for anyone to tweak a picture, delete unwanted items or even combine the best aspects of several similar pictures into one.

The tools are giving everyone the ability of the Stalin-era propagandists, who edited the photographic record of history by deleting people who fell out of favor.

Wayner's last statement is a bit troubling. Sure, we have the tools now to seamlessly stretch the truth, but do we need to? In my on-going survey on digital manipulation more than 40 percent of respondents indicated that they could tell when a picture had been altered.

2007-2008 snapshot of the photo manipulation survey related to whether people can tell if a picture has been altered.   2006-2007: Note that the sample sizes differ considerably.


During my time surveying people about digital photo manipulation, a fairly high percentage of people report they can tell when a picture has been altered. I find this opinion interesting, because in my own experience I am not as skillful.

In my own experience, I find myself having less time to carefully scrutinize pictures. I do  assume, though, that there is an increase in altered images in the media with the introduction of digital technologies, but because of the volume of pictures flooding our consciousness, I tend, like many people, to just scan images quickly. I tend to judge the authenticity of a picture on the context and source in which it is disseminated. For example, I would tend to trust the authority of a news image in The New York Times over an advertising image any day. This means that I wouldn't typically spend time looking for manipulated images in The New York Times, while I just assume that most advertising images have been altered to varying degrees.

Getting back to Baldassi's software, which is based on the seam carving work of Shai Avidan and  Ariel Shamir, it makes sense that many of these tools will become commonly accepted by people over time. In the future, we will just expect that the images we see have been enhanced in some way and that the notion of objective reality is nothing more than a passing fancy.    

Photo of WWII correspondent Ernie Pyle resurfaces after more than 60 years

Photo Credit: Alexander Roberts/ Via AP/ Richard Strasser

He is among the most venerated war correspondents in American History. When Ernie Pyle died in April 1945, covering the battle of Okinawa, the country mourned his loss. Pyle was in the prime of his journalistic career and had developed a style of war-reporting that was riveting and heart-felt.  Richard Pyle of the Associated Press reports that pictures showing Pyle's death were censored by the government and then lost to memory for more than six decades. Recently, Alexander Roberts' image of Pyle's body resurfaced. Historically, the image is important in that it reminds us of the sacrifice people pay for freedom.  Pyle knew the risk he was taking in covering the war, but this picture reminds us of what that risk would ultimately mean.  

Imagination at gun point

Photo Credit: AP/ Miguel Villagran

Photo Credit: AFP Photo/File/Jeff Haynes

Life can be truly stranger than fiction at times. Images reproducing very separate beliefs and ideals, signify how normalized celebrating the culture of the gun has become. Some people believe that our society would be safer if everyone could defend themselves by owning a firearm. Others say that firearms only encourage people to settle disputes using violence. Whatever the justification for handguns in society, these two images conjure up distinct meanings.

In the first frame, the handgun is celebrated as high fashion. The picture was made during the Berlin Fashion Week and shows a model wearing a belt designed like a gun. The handgun is depicted as an accessory -- one representing a haute couture statement of excess.

The second image is more edifying in some way, since it is used to illustrate an underpinning ideology in American society. The image illustrates a story about how West Virginia is considering a bill to teach schoolchildren how to use firearms in the hope that the initiative will increase state revenues from hunting licences. The picture is intentionally generic and indexical -- it is not meant to address the deeper significance of what it would mean to teach schoolchildren how to use firearms. I can just imagine a student's class schedule: homeroom, math, English, and handguns. The sobering side of all this is that in 2004, the FBI reported that 66 percent of the 16,137 murders in 2004 were committed with firearms.