Embrace your inner fuddy-duddy

Colleague and I got into a discussion of Annie Leibovitz’ new book, Annie Leibovitz at Work.

If you haven’t read it, you should. It’s both an excellent inspiration for the portrait photographer and a powerful pictorial history of the last 40 years. I’m not always a fan of “behind the scenes with photographer X” books, but first of all, this is Annie Leibovitz we’re talking about, not Joe-I-once-shot-some-celebrities-Jones. Second, the photos are just plain damn fabulous. Third, she’s pretty forthcoming both about the philosophy of her shooting as well as pertinent technical details, which makes me want to grab some faces and start shooting pixels.

Anyway, since Leibovitz is on my top ten photographers of all time list (and possibly also the top five), I pretty much devoured the book…and was kinda brought up short by the rather extensive digital manipulation of Leibovitz’ later shots, particularly her work at Vogue. She’d shoot actors at different times (and sometimes in different cities), then have her digital techs seamlessly stitch the images together and fill in the gaps with still other images, so that Judy Dench appears to be driving at night with a very unhappy Helen Mirren when in reality they were photographed in separate sessions.

Now, admittedly these weren’t her photojournalism portraits, they were fantasy fashion shoots. But since I pretty much worship Leibovitz’ masterful use of light and her ability to expose personality, I was taken aback: If the digital guy was really creating the image, why the heck did they need Annie? Why couldn’t any yahoo with a good lightman shoot gazillions of frames, then have the tech cut-and-paste the best part of each into a gen-u-wine Annie Leibovitz picture?

Yarg.

My associate shrugged. “It’s all digital manipulation anyway. Why does it bother you more than altering the white balance on a bad exposure?”

I gave that some thought and came to a rather startling conclusion:

I am a fuddy-duddy.

I’ve spent a lifetime trying to drag teeth-baring fuddy-duddies out of their dark little Luddite caves when something new comes along. But now–apparently–I’m hunkering down in my own little cave: “It’s one thing to enhance the photo with the same stuff you can do in any film darkroom,” I said, loftily, “It’s quite another to change its reality by sticking in stuff that wasn’t really there. It’s like when National Geographic* moved the pyramids.”

She smiled pityingly. “Well, that’s what’s in your comfort zone. You know, the world may have moved on.”

The National Press Photographers Association has pretty specific rules for what constitutes unacceptable image manipulation (basically, if it misleads the viewer, forget it). Again, though, that’s mostly for photojournalism, where the image is meant to inform and/or help the viewer make a decision.

Where do you draw the line for other photography? And why is this bothering me so much?

The sweet spot of photography is that wondrous, angel-eyed joining of skill, experience and luck which can capture the image or expose the person no one else can find. Most photographers stumble on it once or twice, then spend a lifetime trying to find it again. Ms. Leibovitz does it as a matter of course. Maybe that’s why the ultraphotoshopping grates so much.

I can’t respect composited, altered-reality images unless the alterations are made obvious in the final result. Of course, Edward Steichen (another of my top 10) famously said, “Every photograph is a fake from start to finish, a purely impersonal, unmanipulated photograph being practically impossible.” When we change the white balance, darken a sky to increase the drama, lighten up a shadow under a man’s hat…are we enhancing reality or creating something that no human eye could have seen, i.e., lying?

I once saw an exhibit demonstrating the processes Ansel Adams used to create “Moonrise over Hernandez,” an eerily beautiful shot of a sleeping desert village. The original photograph didn’t look like much more than a child’s quick snapshot. What made the image was Adams’ masterful darkroom work. So…was that photo “a fake from start to finish?”

(And, BTW, the corollary of this puts paid to any idiot who still thinks that photography cannot be fine art because it’s simply recording the moment. A great photographer MAKES the shot.)

In my business it’s pretty common to ”shop” in new logos, strip out a distracting model in a product shot, supersaturate a color to make it look more like the real thing. I’m fine with that as long as, ultimately, the photo doesn’t tell a lie. The real question, I suppose, is what constitutes a lie?

And so I’m trying to figure out whether to embrace my inner fuddy-duddy…or get with the times and accept virtual surgery as just another photographic tool, one that replaces an eye-of-the-moment with Photoshop.

So far, the embracing idea is still winning.

__________________________

*For those of you who were living under a pyramid in 1982, the February National Geographic cover that year (above) featured a classic shot of camels silhouetted against the Great Pyramids of Giza. The shot was too wide to fit the magazine’s very vertical cover format, so the editors used a Scitex image editing system to move one of the pyramids closer to the other. They most likely also moved the camels around to make the composition more interesting.

The photographer cried foul, and the massive outcry was as much due to public realization of digital technology’s ability to change reality as it was to the actual manipulation. BTW, the Scitex they used had a fraction of the capabilities available for free today to any amateur. Interestingly, it was later discovered that the photographer himself had paid the camel drivers to move through his shot, which raises yet another question… 

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