UCR ARTS: California Museum of Photography
Curated by Douglas McCulloh
Lies are ever-present in human affairs, a tidal flow that rises and falls. Recently, lies have been at flood stage and photographs are central to the surge.
Statements, strings of words, are readily seen as assertions, claims. Photographs, on the other hand, are presumed to be a form of evidence. In Susan Sontag’s phrase, we assume photographs are “directly stenciled off the real.” Consequently, photographs, even dubious ones, carry credence in a way that words do not. Moreover, writes theorist Lev Manovich, “the reason we think that computer graphics technology has succeeded in faking reality is that we, over the course of the last hundred and fifty years, have come to accept the image of photography and film as reality.” For these main reasons and scores of lesser ones, photographs are ideal vehicles for lies. (Read More)
In purest form, a manipulated image is an original mutated. Manipulated images commonly begin with an unaltered photograph then use technical means to falsify, replace, or combine selected elements. Photoshop, the raster graphic editor released February 19, 1990, is the dominant software for manipulating digital still images (though there are many others). Photoshop enables a huge range of modifications from wholesale alterations and additions down to the revision of a single pixel.
“However much [photographs] may lie, they do so with the raw materials of truth.”
—Wright Morris, (writer and photographer, 1910–1998)
“A photograph is supposed not to evoke but to show. That is why photographs, unlike handmade images, can count as evidence. But evidence of what?
—Susan Sontag, (writer, theorist, critic, 1933–2004)
“It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Oglivy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence... Comrade Oglivy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.”
—George Orwell, (writer, 1903–1950)
“The question at hand is the danger posed to truth by computer-manipulated photographic imagery. How do we approach this question in a period in which the veracity of even the straight, unmanipulated photograph has been under attack for a couple of decades.”
—Martha Rosler, (artist and writer, 1943–)
“Your sight does not master the pictures, it is the pictures that master your sight.”
—Franz Kafka, (writer, 1883–1924)