Maslow’s hierarchy of needs should be rejiggered to feature another irresistible human drive. Who can resist drawing black curling mustaches on billboard pictures of beautiful ingénues and decorating upstanding pillars of society with devil’s horns and pitchforks? Photoshop has given us the power to satisfy this need and then some, but these days the influence of photo manipulation seems so pervasive and so powerful that its place in society is being debated in the British Parliament.

Britain is considering a law making it illegal to photoshop ads in publications intended for readers less than 16 years old, according to Jezebel.com. There is concern that the pervasiveness of photoshopping –- some believe it is used in 99% of the images in the media today –- is influencing young people to damage themselves by pursuing ever more unrealistic body images.

The spread of pro-anorexia websites on the Internet is testimony to this trend, though many are disguised. “Thinspiration” is a word you can search on to find them. The sites you find will show you that the problem is real, and serious. The British law would also require a disclaimer on all photoshopped publications; the Web has featured witty suggestions for the wording, including “This image has been manipulated to harm your self esteem.”

I have to say, though, that photoshopping can be fun. I remember illustrating a newsletter with a picture of our newly-installed department head grafted to a snapshot of the Tower of London, where British kings were sent their enemies to die. He did have to explain it to some people: photoshopping was less common in those days. As far as I know, no one was outraged by the fraudulent photo. As photo manipulation goes, it wasn’t a masterpiece, but it wasn’t a hack job either. I guess my boss was lucky I didn’t do a picture of him seeming to have sex with a sheep, as suggested on DemocraticUnderground.com.

Such photo manipulation is much less acceptable if it is done to mislead us for political ends. In late 2008, there was the photograph of Kim Jong Il reviewing his troops. The image was presumably disseminated to counter rumors of the North Korean leader’s failing health. The London Times and the BBC reported that it was a fake and showed how it had been done. There was much discussion in the media about the ethics of the alteration. But commentary on the Internet can cut right to the bone. The website 4thpip posted a photo which clipped Kim Jong Il from the manipulated image and re-photoshopped him into a picture of Elvis impersonators.

Still, that instance seems benign in comparison with the manipulations that seem to have taken place of photographs from the 2006 Lebanon War. Wikipedia reports that a Reuters photographer was fired for “enhancing” images that showed Lebanese damage from an Israeli air strike, though photoshopping was only part of the issue. There were allegations that other images, of rubble with children’s toys, were staged. And Salam Daher, the head of the South Lebanon civil defense organization, admitted that he felt it was part of his job to dig the bodies of children from rubble and displaying them for photographers. True but false?

Another photo controversy from the same war involves a video of an ambulance allegedly damaged by an Israeli missile strike. However, bloggers who studied the photographs pointed to signs suggesting fakery: the damage was too slight for an air strike, and the ambulance seemed to be rusty. The website zombietime.com claims the incident was a hoax designed to pressure Israel into abandoning its military campaign, and urges the media to be more critical of the scenes they are offered.

In fact, the whole issue of photo manipulation has to do with understanding what we are seeing, and to the delight of us English teachers, with something called critical thinking. A whole new kind of visual literacy is being developed in the schoolhouse of the Internet: the critical decoding of images. This can be evidenced by the bloggers who carefully examined the Kim Il Jong photograph discussed above, as well as by those who posted the analyses of the Lebanon War photos. Across the Internet, these skills are also being applied to celebrity photos and other photojournalistic work.

Recently, the New York Times withdrew a picture essay about failed construction projects throughout America because an astute analyst showed one of the images had been photoshopped. The paper’s explanation noted the piece claimed the images had not been digitally manipulated. It’s part of my own pathology, I guess, that the denial of images like this triggers a frenzied search to locate them anyway, and the Internet usually satisfies my obsessive need.

In this instance, Kathy’s Remodeling blog provided a link to the disgraced pictures, as well as remarking sensibly that they really belonged in an art gallery. I still don’t see why the Times couldn’t just have corrected the introduction and left the rest as it was, but keeping them at a location Kathy can post has much the same effect. I am reminded of an old motto, “I am a virgin, but this is a very old t-shirt.”

The main point, though, is that more and more people are interested in, and able to spot photoshopping. In fact, there are website communities devoted to posting, and identifying instances of digital manipulation. You can try this web page collection of bad photoshopping: how many errors can you identify?

In some sense, pages like this represent the reemergence of the FAIL meme which allows us to glory in the inadequacies of others by labeling their pathetic efforts with the eponymous term. They also reveal in the old meme an underlying element of visual training. Without realizing it, when you looked at a FAIL image, you were learning to scan a picture to identify the endeavor it represented, and how it had come to ruin. In examining photoshopped images, you are closer to the “Where’s Waldo?” experience of working out a puzzle.

There are also websites where you can enter the community of photoshoppers and hone your skills. PXLEyes, for example, features tutorials and contests of various sorts. In some, you are given a theme to use while others give you an image you must manipulate. Members of the site vote on the submissions, assigning small prizes. Other parts of the site are devoted to tutorials, places to post images, and forums for discussion of issues relating to digital image manipulation.

Worth1000 is a site famous for its photoshop contests. In one calling for “placing Star Wars character, items, vehicles and scenes into classic art works,” I especially like the picture of Virgin Leia dandling baby Yoda. On WebUrbanist, a blog site cluttered with advertising, there is a page of “A Dozen Fantastic Photographic Manipulations.” My favorite is the Stonehenge made of Legos. The best of these images have an Escheresque quality that makes them memorable beyond their cleverness.

But is it art? In the old days, we used to transfer and combine images and it was called decoupage or at best collage, and it was considered a craft or an inferior art form. However, the cultural ascendancy of modernism has anointed collage and mashup the preeminent art forms of our time, and the Internet has danced in the vanguard. In a classic piece (going back to 2002) Stan Choe called photoshopping a subculture art form, saying, “Photo editing is a derivative form, but it’s much like hip hop, which has cemented itself in the past decade, proponents say. Like hip hop, photoshoppers take an original work and manipulate it until it becomes their own unique piece.”

The work of photographer Jeff Wall is a case in point. Wall began using photo manipulation in the 1990’s. Perhaps his most famous image is a homage to a Japanese woodblock print in a photograph called “A Sudden Gust of Wind.” The picture was created by the digital assemblage of over 100 photographs taken in more than a year. The gallery notes at the Tate Modern quote the artist as follows:

I have always considered my work to be a mimesis of the effects of cinema and of painting (at least traditional painting), and so the fictional, formal and poetic part of it has always been very important.

The website Art & Story says

Wall does not let painting-love trap his photographs. He takes inspiration from all over, giving his art enough metaphysical room to breathe; his compositional intensity helps ensure that he does not also succumb to loose pastiche. He’s a student of modern film and of the traditions of photography.

And I might add, he and others like him have changed the nature of what can be properly regarded as a photograph. As always, a phenomenon asserts its greatest power at the moment when it disappears from our sight and becomes just another tool, to be used well or badly. The work of Jeff Wall, then, is the best indication that photoshopping is no longer an issue, no matter how many picture essays the New York Times disavows.

Tweet  Print This Post

Tags: art & entertainment, stone age memes, technology // Add Comment »