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Photoshop Allows Us To Alter Our Memories
Anti-Globalism writes "In an age of digital manipulation, many people believe that snapshots and family photos need no longer stand as a definitive record of what was, but instead, of what they wish it was. It used to be that photographs provided documentary evidence, and there was something sacrosanct about that, said Chris Johnson, a photography professor at California College of the Arts in the Bay Area. If you wanted to remove an ex from an old snapshot, you had to use a Bic pen or pinking shears. But in the digital age, people treat photos like mash-ups in music, combining various elements to form a more pleasing whole. What were doing, Mr. Johnson said, is fulfilling the wish that all of us have to make reality to our liking. And he is no exception. When he photographed a wedding for his girlfriends family in upstate New York a few years ago, he left a space at the end of a big group shot for one member who was unable to attend. They caught up with him months later, snapped a head shot, and Mr. Johnson used Photoshop to paste him into the wedding photo. Now, he said, everyone knows it is phony, but this faked photograph actually created the assumption people kind of remember him as there."
What's the point? PS (or the gimp for that matter) only allows more people to alter photographs, anything you do with software can be done, and has been done many times, in a dark room.
I've had enough of theese "film-was-way-better" guys already.
Didn't George Orwell warn us about trying to change our history? I'll keep my photographs as they are, thanks.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
http://abcnews.go.com/technology/story?id=98195&page=1
I love to cite this study whenever a decision is being made on the 'memory' of, say, a result - rather than an actual record.
There is another study, which I can't promply locate, in which subjects were shown several colors and then a day or two later, when asked to recall which colors they saw, they picked colors brighter and more saturated than those they had been shown.
This, to me, shows why the 'golden age' phenomenon is so prevalent.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
You know all those ancient statues and such and sculptures made or those paintings by artists? Do you honestly think that everyone generally looked as good as the painting/statues? We've always done this. If anything because, I as the king/rich person would lop off some artist/sculpture's head if they didn't make me look good.
Move forward a few centuries and you've got household publishing with the internet/office apps. I wouldn't lop off the wife's or the kids' heads if they didn't make me look good in the family website or photo album, but we'd all pick the shots and photoshop what we can get away with to look our best. (The wife and kids have been taught what we think is decent taste in picking out photos and better pictures from a set so they should know better than posting poor pics.)
It's sort of like the concept of dressing up for photos. No one ever actually wears that sort of crap. It's only used to make you look as what the current culture set thinks presentable for art/photos/pictures is and that's it. (It's all rented or thrown away after that single use because you'd never wear it again.)
in a way, digital photography has taken things away from us.
Photo's used to be precious, they carried a real cost (film, development and printing), and because of that, you used to think about what was worth taking a picture of. Today, a cheap memory card will hold hundreds of photo's, and digital cameras are cheaper than decent quality analog camera's have ever been. It's nearly impossible to find a new cellphone without a (crappy) digital camera in it.
Because a digital photo carries practically no cost, people tend to be less thoughtful about what they take pictures of.
Already, I've found myself frustrated and drowning in thousands of mediocre pictures.
These pictures reside everywhere and nowhere; some are uploaded to various websites, others are emailed, yet others exist only on a hard drive and maybe a backup somewhere. The ease and low cost of copying should mean that shouldn't ever get lost, but in reality, they do get lost, hard drives crash, optical disks go bad, or they are just forgotten in a swamp of old files never to be found again.
There is something about a box full of old, fading photographs that digital photo's just can't offer.
And that's just assuming the photo's haven't been altered. With analog photo's, you could be reasonably sure they weren't faked, because it was fairly difficult and time consuming to fake an analog picture. With the digital ones, it gets easier all the time. What's the point of having a photo of something that didn't happen? You might as well watch a movie, that's not real either.
Ofcourse, I understand why a professional photographer would want to change a picture, for artistic reasons, or to remove something ugly from a picture, like a piece of trash in the background of your best wedding photo.
Well, the religion of Buddhism is based around the idea that reality is simply a delusion on the grandest scale and once you come to understand that you'll be at peace.
On the same subject, our economy is really based on illusion/delusions at the core of it. Money itself is inteself of non-intrisnic value. Well, to be fair... Even gold isn't really useful at the basic levels by itself. (Warren Buffet once joked why do value something that just gets dug up from a hole only to be buried in another somewhere in a bank.)
It is simply only valuable because everyone agrees it to be so. If no one agreed that your money or gold was valuable then you just have unusable matter sitting there.
In the same aspect, all our social interactions and business dealings are based around perception. TV commercials are the best example of why this works the way it does. If you can make people believe in something, to them it is true.
If you have control of this perception then you can make people do as you please... Which I think 1984 was trying to point out to us. Its not about just rewriting history but the perception of people on reality.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I think it's actually interesting to note that this trend of altering photographs actually has deeper roots.
Think about portrait paintings that were all the rage for many hundreds of years before cameras were invented. The portraits were not usually exact recreations of what the painter saw. Usually, the subject was altered slightly to make them look 'better' (more conforming to the beauty ideals of the time period). The person was usually given clothes, jewelery, and surroundings that were prettier than reality (possibly more extravagant than they could really afford). These portraits were not really meant to capture reality: they were meant as a statement (usually "look how important I am", but perhaps also "this is what's meaningful/important to us").
Old photographs were mostly "staged" (especially really old ones where people had to hold still for them), so it's not like they were faithful reflections of reality, either.
Digitally altered images are similar. People are altering the photos to capture something. Not reality. But rather a statement they want to make, like "look how much fun that day was" or "look how beautiful I am" or "look how much I love you" or whatever.
I'm not going to pass a value judgment on whether this trend is "good" or "bad". Rather I will note a few things:
1. As computer power increases, automated "adjustment" of photos is likely to become more common. (Everything from relatively benign red-eye-removal and HDR tweaking, to more drastic things like automatically making people look prettier.)
2. It may be that only for a thin slice of history were the majority of photos "real"--in the time period where photography was fast and cheap enough to snap "candid shots" but before photo-manipulation was fast and cheap enough to alter them.
3. Despite all this modification, I'm sure plenty of "real" photos will remain--journalists, historians, and even normal folk will still be inclined to archive unmodified pictures. Especially with storage costs dropping, keeping the raw image files (before manipulation) will likely continue. In fact I would hope that future image formats would maintain an internal undo history, where the original photo-data remains.
Personal "photographic records" have always told a more perfect story.
For one, how many of us photograph our dreary work lives? From looking at my photo album, one would think I do nothing but roam the exotic corners of the Earth. (Which is not the case, I assure you).
Furthermore, I personally toss out the photos in which I'm looking stupid, drooling, spilling my beer on myself or caught ogling cleavage. So the "photographic record" of myself has always been some shiny, respectable version of reality.
We humans love to represent reality with a positive spin. It's what we do. It's the same reason we wear clothes.
Move along. Nothing new here.
I agree with you as regards purely artistic photography. Plenty of the techniques there - fish-eye lenses, long or multiple exposures, colored lenses, etc - already distort reality for artistic purposes.
What I wonder is this: is there a way to take photos as reliable documentary evidence anymore? How can you prove that something has not been altered?
Except it did so already several times. Admittedly, not during the lifetimes of those involved, but 2000 years later you get a list of Pharaohs where Horemheb follows directly after Amenhotep III. (Hint: there's more than one missing there.) And you take it seriously. Heck, it doesn't even take that long. A mere couple hundred years after the fact, Egyptian historians themselves were compiling lists of Pharaohs with the same missing names and not noticing anything funny about them. I doubt that it was pure conspiracy and with everyone knowing that they're faking history.
Plus, I think that Orwell's point wasn't that you can get people to suddenly forget, but that you can get everyone to play along and shut up. And that they could and did before. Even if you're sure you saw Comrade Yezhov together with Comrad Stalin (to use a real historical example), you keep your mouth shut because you don't fancy a visit from the NKVD. A generation later, already kids are learning a history without Yezhov, and nobody bothers telling them otherwise. The Damnatio Memoria is now complete. Or conversely more than one dictator manufactured a revolutionary history for himself, and placed himself in photos of fights and protests he wasn't actually present at. A generation later, and maybe a purge or two of those who are actually in a position to say he wasn't there, and that has just become history.
Actually, I doubt that many people realize it as clear as you claim. Most people, especially from cultures which heavily faked history, just think that their version is right and everyone _else_ is biased or lying.
Look no further than the Eastern Bloc, where ancient border disputes were exaggerated and occasionally even fictionalized, to keep people's attention focused on those instead of on the present-day internal problems. You know, keep them thinking "OMG, country X is teh enemy because they took one of our provinces 1000 years ago!" instead of looking at who's having a more immediate and substantial impact upon their standard of living. _Especially_ countries which, honestly, had just gotten some province as reward after WW1 or WW2, invented elaborate layers of rationales as to why it was always theirs anyway.
I don't think most of those, even history teachers, actually knew that they're teaching a faked or biased history. Nor that they'd think, basically, "I wouldn't use a history book from country X because their bias is different from ours and it wouldn't sell." They thought more along the lines of "OMG, the people from country X are a bunch of evil liars! They still teach that province Y was originally theirs! They even print historical maps where it's painted as theirs!" (Never mind that at that point in history it actually was "theirs".)
Or as other examples, look at how the Crusades are perceived differently by different people. Or how Napoleon is a national hero to the French and almost an archvillain for some other people. Etc.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the whole point about having a bias is that you're unaware of it. You don't think "man, I'm from country X, I guess I have no choice but to be biased against country Y. Let's see which history books fit my bias." If you can think in those terms, you're already unbiased and rational about it. Being biased is more like already knowing something to be true, and looking for the sources that fit that pre-defined truth.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
To be quite honest though, those who are professionals at digital manipulation would never save their work as .jpg before they are finished. From personal experience, if I need to flatten the image and save it, I'll go for a lossless .png format. However if you have any version of photoshop made within the last decade or so, you'll have a handy feature called "snapshots" built right into photoshop - which stores the state of the manipulation you are currently at, and you can revert to at any time. This almost entirely eliminates any need to save the file as a different format save for finishing.
.jpg is quite easy. Simply adding random noise to the image will throw off any algorithm trying to scan it for compression, while being nearly undetectable to the eyes. This is also a pretty common thing to do when doing professional manipulations, as it often will make it more believable if the noise across the photograph is uniform.
Also though, to get around the deterioration of the
tl;dr - Those are only follies that someone who wasn't a professional would fall prey to. Any digital professional would bypass all of those simply due to how he went about doing his job.