A photo never lies, so the saying goes. On the contrary, a photo can say exactly what its creator intended it to say. From the point of view of the two original Greek words that make up our word photography, the word means simply “written light.” It is fitting then that analogy may be made to writing. Writing can be used in many different ways and for different purposes, but all forms of writing say just what the author intended. On the one hand, you may have a factual report or a quick message in an e-mail. On the other hand, you have great fiction or poetry filled with figurative language.
Photography, like writing, can be used for different purposes. It could be used to just get the facts, perhaps used to document a crime scene or just an iPhone snapshot of a restaurant receipt. It could be used to document an event, such as a child’s birthday party. It could be pursued as an art, in search of interesting shapes or colors, or certain scenes to create a certain mood. It can even be used to provide art assets for creative fictional images. You see, like writing, photography can take many forms and have many purposes. It can cover an equally broad spectrum of fact versus fiction.
To continue our writing analogy, even when in the world of nonfiction the author crafts his words to give the report he intended. A writer of history can give his own perspective and commentary on a factual event without falsifying the evidence. A journalist can tell the story he wants by choosing which facts to emphasize and how to describe them. Two people recounting the same event can end up telling two different stories without saying the slightest thing untrue. Each one highlights the elements he wants, omitting the elements that he does not care to emphasize for some reason. The adjectives, gestures, and inflection in his voice all work together to color the story his way. The truth is that all writing is to one degree or another slanted by the intention of the author.
Photography is also about telling a story, and the choices the photographer makes dictate the nature of the story. A photograph can be just as selective. The framing of a shot can have one of the most drastic impacts on the story told. Imagine a photographer who shoots a lovely wildflower on the edge of a field on a warm afternoon. Perhaps the story told is of serenity, of calm, of warmth, of life. Now imagine the photographer turns 180 degrees and takes a picture of the garbage dump just in front of him on the edge of that same field. He is standing in the same place, but now his story is about decay, rejection, disorder. When the photographer composed each shot, he made a decision about the kind of story he wanted to tell.
Of course, there is much more to the way a story can be told through photography than simply framing the shot. The photographer can also be selective about what details are absent while in the frame. He sets his exposure for his intended subject, while other details may be over or underexposed, even to the point of being invisible. The nature of the lighting of the subject can contribute to the mood of the photo, as can the setting of white balance (the color tint). He may choose to stop down the aperture to capture a wide range of crisp detail across great distance, or he may let it go fully open to throw the background out of focus. He may choose a slow shutter speed when photographing a moving subject to convey the idea of speed and action, or he may choose a fast shutter speed to freeze the action. All of these different choices affect the story that is made out of reality. Just like the two people telling different stories of the same event, two people can photograph the same event and come out with very different kinds of photographs.
All of these things happen when the picture is taken, but the story is not finished when the shutter closes. There is also the post-processing to do. Many people have an aversion to post-processing. Perhaps they miss the way it was in the “good old days” before a person could use computers to manipulate images. They forget that some of the greatest photographs were processed with a number of advanced techniques in the darkroom. The average person never had access to a darkroom. They simply shot several frames, took their film to be developed in a largely automated way, and got back their prints. Never mind that their prints did not look as good as what the contemporary professionals were doing, they did it the “good old way.”
Others seem to have the idea that post-processing photographs is somehow cheating. They pride themselves on leaving their images in the state they were at the time of capture. But consider further our writing analogy. Under some circumstances, an e-mail for instance, a writer may quickly jot down some words and send it right away without giving it much thought. The words end up dry, unmoving, and even rough, but it will have served its purpose of getting the message across. But then there is other writing that seeks the enjoyment of what is written itself. No novelists hands his typewritten first draft to the publisher to be photocopied and spiral bound as is. He goes through several rewrites. He has a professional editor to polish the text, to look for elements of the story that should be altered or left out completely. It takes time to polish the original writing to achieve just the story that was intended. Then once the writing is ready, they get an artist to design some appealing cover art and bind it in an attractive way. No major work is brought to the masses unedited.
Yet why should photography be any different? How is the editing process vilified as cheating? Clearly it would be cheating to alter a crime scene photograph, just as it would be perjury to falsely use our words in testimony. But how is it that perspective or even outright fiction is appreciated in writing but not in photography?
The final image should be judged solely by the story that the photographer has told. For example, in the days when my interest in photography was just surfacing, I was at the end of a three month trip in Europe. Our money was about gone, and all we could do was see what we could on train and foot. We didn’t even have money for a place to stay that night. We would just have to return on the train. While wondering around Stockholm one very cold night, I made a picture from the top of a bridge overlooking the city. The photo came out with a pronounced orange tint because of the city lights. When I edited that photo, I changed the tint from orange to blue. Had I falsified my photo? Some say I had. I say, however, that I told the story I wanted to tell, and my story was not about what I saw, it was about what I felt on that very cold night.
Post-processing can use all kinds of techniques like tint shift to tell the right story. It can also be used to take care of some less-than-ideal shooting condition that was unavoidable. Just what a photographer changes or leaves alone is his decision. For my part, when editing a shot of a person, I will usually take out a scrape and leave in a freckle. If my child has a smudge of dirt on her face, I will likely take it off. What is the difference in a parent hurriedly giving a spit bath just before the shot instead of removing the smudge in post processing? How is one accepted and the other cheating? It might be that the dirty playful state is part of the story, and just as a storyteller will highlight the interesting points, a photographer might emphasize the dirty smudge as part of his story. Or it may be one of those details that is a distraction to a different story that should be eliminated, just as a storyteller will leave out the extraneous details.
The point is that the photographer should be allowed to tell his story without being accused of cheating. He should decide for himself what the purpose of his work shall be. Some people enjoy hunting to get the image just right in camera (and here we’ll be nice and conveniently forget about the fact that there is post-processing that happens in the camera). I say that’s great. They get to tell their own story the way they want. However, they should not impose their version of storytelling on us all.
For my part, most of my images—especially of my kids—tend to be closer to fact than fiction. I usually don’t want to make my children into something they’re not. Yet the story that I try to present in photographs of my children is the kind of story that any father would tell about his children: one that looks on them with a rose tinted...uh...lens. The memories we carry with us of our children when they were little are often nostalgically skewed, and that is exactly the way I like to capture those moments of life.
Photos never lie? No, they just tell a story. These are my stories, and I’m sticking to them.