So, I asked about manipulating photographs last class and both Mark and Jenny, that I saw, have talked about it in their blogs.
I have been thinking about it more and I guess I am okay with it as long as it is fully disclosed - the changes made and where to find the “original” photo. But then I thought, as reading Cameron Moll’s blogs That Wicked Worn Look and Wornamental, Thornamental and the many linked blogs, don’t photos already convey certain biases and problems before any alterations are made?
For example, I remember in an undergraduate art history class discussing one of Alexander Gardner’s famous photos of several dead soldiers after the battle of Cold Harbor. The consensus was that the photo had been positioned to be as dramatic as possible, with all of the skulls facing the camera and that leg hanging out front. A more contemporary example would be the subject of Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers - the planting of the flag on top Iwo Jima’s tallest ridge. The photo taken of that, which is now immortalized in the Marines monument in Arlington, was the second time that action had been performed with a different flag.
What does this mean for historians? Are those two actions (here I am, for argument’s sake, assuming Gardner’s photo was staged) somehow distorted because of the knowledge that these photos were doctored in some way? I don’t think so, only because what they symbolize and represent (which is, as far as I am concerned, the importance of photos - they aren’t the event, that can never be recreated; instead, photos, just like documentary evidence, are merely representations of the event) is still conveyed - Cold Harbor was a very costly battle in casualties for the Union Army and the Marines had taken the tallest and most heavily guarded pieces of Iwo Jima.
Thus, in the end, I think I lean more towards Mark et al who say a better idea than retooling a photo with the “worn” look to make it appear as it would now after years of aging, would be to make it look like it did when it was taken. Then, I suppose the question is how do we know what that looks like? And that, it seems, is where some good ol’ fashioned research would be needed…
6 March 2007 at 10:31 am
A difference between posed shots with an agenda and the historian’s digital manipulation is that it’s better to try to look at a photo and consider the content and agenda of the photographer at that time, as opposed to the content, agenda of the photographer, AND agenda of the historian who engineered a new image from an old one.
Bill
6 March 2007 at 11:40 am
I’m not sure why people have so much resistance to the idea of digital retouching of images… to me, it seems like it’s not too different from most of the tools in the Historian’s toolbox.
Historians meddle with History. It’s what we do. If we really wanted pristine history, without our fingerprints all over it, we would leave history alone. We wouldn’t write about it, order it, create narratives about it, interpret it, collate or compute data… We’d let the historical record stand.
We don’t do that, though– and we shouldn’t. We SHOULD meddle with history. There’s value to that.
The argument that images should be presented unretouched, unedited, uncropped, just as they are because doing otherwise “un-historian-like” seems patently ridiculous to me, personally. Imagine someone making the same argument about textual sources: “Historians shouldn’t change text! It should appear just as it did in the original, unaltered, unabridged, verbatim! It’s antithetical to the role of the historian to do anything but include the full text of a document. Elipses and quotation are anti-historical.”
It only *seems* reasonable to say such things about images– because, as you point out, there is this myth that images somehow speak truth… When this is often not the case at all.
6 March 2007 at 12:21 pm
[...] to change at will. Steven brought up an excellent point that the photos may be staged, etc…I commented that we need to eliminate as many agendas as possible, starting with the [...]
6 March 2007 at 7:14 pm
As Tad says, I think digital historians should be excited about the opportunities to manipulate images and improve their presentation (though I’m not quite sure how the historical record would stand without historians). The comments I made on my blog concerning the need to carefully document the restoration/retouching process is actually more concerned with the historical record we are leaving as much as the one we are studying. Trying to include as much information as possible seems like not only a safeguard against misinformation, but also a helping hand to those who will follow us.