‘The Photograph never lies: Yea, Right!’

Some Wag, had nicked a picture from my surveillance gallery. He downloaded it, messed with it in photoshop, then sent it back to me by e-mail, having interpreted his art! Lovely

Apart from being rude to policemen, this example demonstrates the ease by which a photograph can be digitally manipulated. The artist amungst us, interested in montage, album covers, magazines etc, find these tools truely liberating. From an evidential point of view, however, digital images may be looked on with some suspicion.

“The possibilities of photography as surveillance and the ability of photographs to manipulate `the truth’ were brutally played out in the Paris Commune (1871).

Photographs originally taken for and by the Communards as historic records and in celebration of their short-lived `revolution’ over the oppressive Second Empire soon found a lucrative market in the anti-Communard press. After the authorities finally crushed the uprising, these same photographs were used to help draw up the execution list. It was also in this conflict(1870s) that doctored `documentary’ images came of age. Eugene Appert’s composite montages purported to show executions carried out by the Communards but Appert had pre-constructed the scenes and cunningly pasted into the image faces of those arrested after the authorities victory. In a short but important few months the myths about the objectivity of the documentary image and its use as a controlling force had all been laid bare”

British Journal of Photography: 17 April 1996

Digital Imaging as Evidence http://tash.gn.apc.org/digital_man.htm

‘A Progression from Photography to the Internet’ [P/18]

http://tash.gn.apc.org/digitalphoto_progress.pdf