Digital Imaging Essay Research Paper Julia Short

Digital Imaging Essay, Research Paper

Julia Short

Digital imaging inevitably undermines photography’s status as an essentially truthful medium. Discuss.

Until recently, at least, it was possible to define photography as a process involving optics, light sensitive material and the chemical processing of this material to produce prints or slides. Today though, that definition is subject to change. Technological innovations…are shifting photography from its original chemical basis towards electronics… It is not overstating it to say that the advent of this new technology is changing the very nature of photography, as we have known it. (Bode and Wombell 1991)

In the last decade computer technology has been introduced to photography yet again challenging the meaning of photography. This relatively new digital technology allows the photographic image to be easily manipulated or modified. The pace of change in how images can be produced, circulated and consumed has been rapid causing a tidal wave of journalistic and critical attention. It is viewed that the manipulation of the photographic image may lead to a profound undermining of photography’s status as a truthful form of displaying images. The photograph does no longer necessarily show the truth or the true image. Once digitised a photograph can be altered in many ways, the texture, tone, form and colour can be changed pixel by pixel, the focus can be sharpened, things can be taken out or replicated or the original image can be combined with another. It is also far more difficult to detect changes made with computerised alterations where as older methods of alterations are far easier to detect. With the increasing accessibility and use of digital imaging technology, anyone possessing suitably, reasonably well priced equipment, i.e. – a pc, relevant software and a scanner can make these alterations and radically alter the content and appearance of a photograph as well as create seamless interweaving of separate images.

In 1991 an exhibition called photo video: Photography in the age of the computer was held at The Photographers Gallery, London. In the exhibition and the book of the same title the authors sketched out the implications of encoding photographs as ‘units of electronic information’:

1) A shift in the location of photographic production; from the chemical darkroom to the ‘electronic darkroom’ of the computer

2) The outputting of single photographic originals in an expanded range of ways, from ‘hardcopy’ through transparencies and varying forms of print, to the TV screen.

3) An unprecedented ease, sophistication and invisibility of enhancing and manipulating photographic images.

4) The entry of photographic images into a global information and communications system as they become instantaneously transmissible in the form of electronic pulses passing along telephone lines and via satellite links.

5) The high-speed transmission of news images which are no longer containable within territorial and political boundaries.

6) The conversion of existing photographs and historical archives into digital storage banks, which can be accessed at the screens of remote computer terminals.

7) The potential of the new information and image networks for greatly extending the practises of military and civil surveillance.

8) The unprecedented convergence of the still photographic image with other, previously distinct, media: digital audio, video, graphics, animation and other kinds of data in new forms of interactive multi media.

However as the authors stressed, probably more significant than the change in how images are produced, distributed and used, are the ideas to which the changes are giving rise and how digital imaging is challenging and changing traditional ways of seeing and thinking. It seems that our traditional belief that ‘the camera never lies’ has been brought into question. It also appears important to consider who stands to lose when the truth of the photographic image stops being accepted. It is apparent that public opinion is divided and that there is both worry and excitement surrounding the developments.

For many people and types of businesses digital technology has many advantages and is extremely useful. It has been especially advantageous to people such as press photographers, artists and advertising designers. This method of virtually undetectable computerised alterations has allowed photojournalists and newspaper editors to manipulate images in order to create more sensational pictures and stories and as a result sell more papers. One example of this is where a daily newspaper altered a photograph of princess Diana and Dodi Alfied. In the original picture the couple were merely sitting next to one another talking but in the false image the position of Dodi’s head was altered to give the impression that they were kissing. This kind of manipulation brings to light the moral and ethical problems involved now that photography has moved into an age of computers. It is now all to easy for the press to not only invade people’s privacy but for them to show bias and give false information in images. This sort of false information can greatly affect a person’s life and the views of the general public in regards to a person in the public eye. There have been movements however to control this misl