“Representations do not imitate reality but are practices through which things take on meaning and value; to the extent that a representation is regarded as realistic, it is because it is so familiar it operates transparently…photography is one of the representational practices that has become so naturalized.”

-Michael J. Shapiro (The Politics of Representation, 1988)

Before computers, photographic manipulation was achieved by retouching with ink or paint, or by using a technique that incorporated multiple exposures on either the negative or the print.  The 1980’s, however, saw the advent of digital retouching with Quantel computers running a program called Paintbox.  In 1982, National Geographic Magazine featured a cover photograph of the Egyptian periods, now famously known as one of the first and most historic cases of digital manipulation.  In the photograph, the pyramids were placed closer together to create a more pleasing composition for their front cover, and it wasn’t until one viewer calculated that such a view of the Egyptian Pyramids was in fact impossible that the public began to realize that photographs could be easily and effectively modified in a nearly imperceptible fashion (raising questions about journalistic integrity along the way).    

(The Quantel system, c. 1980)

Today the legitimacy of imagery is often in question.  From beauty magazines and celebrity tabloids, to Time magazine and various other well-respected news sources, there has since been many questions of authenticity raised over the past several decades.  The ease at which a photograph can be believably manipulated, often within hours of being shot and passed along the news wire, has lead to many false claims to reality.  Although photography’s claim to truth has been questioned prior to the advent of digital manipulation, the addition of simple tools has unquestionably lead to an increase in such cases. 

The shift of the photograph from its physical form into digital data points to lost referents and a loss of the symbiotic relationship it shared with the material world.  Fred Richtin, author of “After Photography”, acknowledges the transition as a problem due to the surface similarities between the images captured by both digital and analogue cameras.  In an interview with Wired Magazine, he summarizes: “[w]e’ve handed digital photographs the aura of analogue photography and it’s camouflaged.” This new technology has effectively increased the gap between reality and fiction. 

If we explore the history of the photograph and its reception amongst the public, a seemingly complete reversal of opinion has occurred.  In its early stages the camera was considered a mechanical tool devoid of its operators mark, and often referred to as a scientific tool, thus assigned nearly the full status of objectivity.  Questioned by cultural critics and art curators, this opinion began to change by the mid-twentieth century.  A well written essay titled “The Photographer’s Eye (1966)” by John Szarkowski, then director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, outlined the many ways in which the photographer influenced the reading of a photograph and lead to the eventual acceptance that the camera was not as innocent of a tool as it had been thought to be.  Many other important figures such as Susan Sontag and John Gossage would further the argument in coming years, stating that rather than providing a glimpse of reality, it was photography’s similarities to how we see that allowed it to become a most dangerous and subtle tool of manipulation.