Is it worth persuing truth via photography and how?

[fate_faith_change_chains]

<blockquote>

<p> Let's say Chuck was in the midst of saying something at the time like "All women should be killed."</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Let's make that " all men killing men should be killed, and all women, giving birth to new men and new women, should be celebrated." !!</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Phylo--</p>

<p>I know you're being tongue-in-cheek but obviously I was using it as an example of something hateful for someone to say. Had I substituted what you are suggesting, it is no longer something hateful and therefore wouldn't really work as an illustrative example for my purposes.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Phylo--</p>

<p>Speaking of no absolute truths, and contexts for truths, I also give a lot of thought and moral weight to overpopulation.</p>

[fate_faith_change_chains]

<p>Fred,</p>

<p>Yes, it was rather tongue in cheek and I realize you were using it as an example. Had you substituted it with my own suggestion it perhaps wouldn't have fitted your purpose as an illustrative example, but wouldn't it have been a more ' positively enlightening ' example ? : )</p>

<p>I agree with you ( having read your initial response ) that there's too much baby's popping out all over the place. Earth can't handle it. What I meant by "giving birth to NEW MEN and new women" was more in the context of giving birth to men who don't kill other men who kill other men who kill... A fantasy. Also women, but in the grander play of things it's mostly about men...killing other men.</p>

<p>Off topic off.</p>

[greg_peterson3]

<p>This post began with, "i feel as though photography has gotten to be more akin to painting than documentation."</p>

<p>Is that a bad thing?</p>

<p>A photograph of a fish is not a fish. It's always going to be "doctored" in some way. <br>

If it's in black and white we will have extracted and discarded the color that was certainly there.<br>

If it's in color, the range of colors in the photo are certainly not exactly those of the fish.<br>

We'll have squashed it into two dimensions.<br>

It no longer has any nutritional value.<br>

We'll have extracted it from the flow of time.<br>

It will not begin to smell bad in a few days.<br>

All of which seems fine to me. I think it's quite enough if my photograph beguiles the eye.</p>

<p>I want to delight or dazzle or inform or amuse or persuade the viewer. All of these things at once if I might.</p>

<p>I'll do to my subject whatever I must to achieve my goal, and if that means somehow failing to document that subject, so be it. </p>

<p>I'll ply my craft using whatever tools I must -- optical, chemical or electronic -- to create a compelling photograph. If, in my quest for that image, I happen to reveal some sort of "truth" about the fish, or about the nature of fish, or about the very definition of 'fishy', that's a bonus. </p>

<p>But I owe my allegiance to the eye, not to the fish.</p>

<p>-- Greg Peterson</p>

 

[Spearhead]

<blockquote>

<p>Is that a bad thing?</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Great question!</p>

<p>FWIW, this whole "truth" thing was really resolved in the 11th century by Hassan-i-Sabbah<em> </em> who came to the realization that <em>Nothing is real, Everything is permitted.<br /> </em> </p>

[lex_jenkins]

<blockquote>

<p>"Reality can be tricky. The photo of Chuck Close for example. Let's say Chuck was in the midst of saying something at the time like "All women should be killed." Some guy with a camera was there at this moment when Chuck was thinking of the next hateful thing to say. (My apologies to Chuck. I know he's not that kind of guy. Just a hypothetical.)"</p>

</blockquote>

<p><br /> And that's a literal example of the problem with trying to assign an intangible such as <em>truth</em> to photography.</p>

<p>One day, someone will Google around and see a snapshot of this thread. Depending on the search parameters used, that Google snapshot may read:</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Chuck Close ... was in the midst of saying ... "All women should be killed."</p>

</blockquote>

<p>And now that I've quoted Fred's hypothetical statement out of context, added ellipses and block-quoted it, the sheer act of repetition and changing the context makes it even more likely that Fred's hypothetical situation will eventually be misquoted as fact, with some lazy sap finally spreading disinformation about a guy who never said anything of the kind.</p>

<p>That's why photography isn't truth. It's a moment of time, often lacking context. Even when it appears there was context, the photo can still be misinterpreted.</p>

<p>Consider the recent flap over <a href="http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&channel=s&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&q=obama+looks+at+girls+butt&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=HuZZStSOB4iwMMjCvEM&sa=X&oi=news_group&ct=title&resnum=1">Obama supposedly ogling a chick's butt</a> . In the still photo it appears the president was indeed admiring the rear end of a young gal (personally, I liked the gal's wavy tresses better). But in the video it's clear that Obama was barely glancing over his shoulder to offer his arm to another woman to help be sure she didn't stumble over a step down.</p>

<p>The photo told neither truth nor lie. But the misinterpretation lead to a lot of lies.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>And me . . . I couldn't take my eyes off Obama.</p>

[david_senesac]

<p>

<p >I might easily argue against some comments in a number of posts above. Or could narrowly address the thread question. However I'll confine my below input to of narrowing the discussion that has otherwise hopelessly scattered itself too broadly.</p>

<p > The first problem is more narrowly defining your posed question. Otherwise the audience is going to run down a number of tangents about the more general philosophical notions of truth that have little to do with the essential nature of photography. (as some have) All a photograph has to offer is from a given camera perspective, a 2-dimensional replication of light similar to that experienced by our human eyes, that in a brief moment exposed film or affected sensor cells. And further if black and white just consider luminance information. Thus the audience needs to confine their musings to that essential nature of photography and not wander broadly elsewhere. </p>

<p > Some might hypothetically pose say a vehicle accident occurs on a busy urban boulevard with many people about where one (meaning one camera) photograph is taken by one of the bystanders. That image may not represent truth in terms of the cause of the accident, as each person at the scene will have visual memory of the experience from different visual perspectives that together is likely add much more important information than the single momentary camera capture. The mistake would be in not recognizing the limits of the camera capture and going beyond information it might logically offer. Likewise someone might capture a picture of a bystander holding a handgun he picked up moments after being thrown down by the murderer with the bloody victim laying in the foreground. Without any additional information, some might jump to a conclusion that the bystander was the killer. </p>

<p >One can take an image of a colorful red and blue parrot with an orange beak and post such an image for public viewing on a website. That the bird's colors are red and blue is true. People may be used to seeing that parrot species in those colors and immediately recognize the species without a thought about the colors. That the colors due to sensor or film non-linearities and transducer issues may shift a given hue 1% on blues, 5% on reds, reduce luminance by 4% etc in no way makes the truth that the subject was red, blue, and orange inaccurate because we sense those parameters roughly and lacking immediate visual comparisons of an actual parrot consider the result "reasonable". However if that same image is provided to a zoologist making a serious study of the exact feather hues of various parrot species, the truth that feathers are roughly red would not be good enough and instead a demand would be expected that the whole color capture system be calibrated to some verifiable level of accuracy against physical standards.</p>

<p >Another facet of photography is its graphic content of luminance information of form and shades. If a trusted news photographer's camera takes an image of a bulldog chomped down on the seat pants of a burglar caught in someone's backyard, regardless of the legal issues, we can all agree given added commentary by the reporter, it represents rather absolute evidence that the perpetrator was there. Sure such could be substantiated further by medical evidence of teeth marks in the bad guys butt, however the photograph alone would be all that is necessary to convince anyone. On the other hand a blurry hand held image of a too distant face is an example of a limitation of the graphic content so there are considerable ranges of what may be gleaned as true and what is relatively questionable, and what is impossible. A photograph taken with a normal lens with several bees on flowers 50 feet away can in no way identify a bee species.</p>

<p > </p>

<p >Thus lets confine truth about photographs, images, and cameras to what they narrowly are understood to produce. Within such confined parameters there are more than enough issues where truth, aka visual graphic fidelity, color fidelity, luminance fidelity, have value in terms of truth. </p>

<p > </p>

<p >In the above parrot example if in post processing a photographer shifts all hues say 45 degrees, all those colors will be obviously wrong and any ordinary person questioned will easily be able to confirm that the displayed parrot had inaccurate colors. Likewise the same might be applied to a mid afternoon scenic image with a blue sky. If the sky colors are shifted too much toward cyan as Velvia can sometimes do. We can relate that it rendered the sky at least a bit inaccurately. And if another photographer jacks up contrast and saturation, and creates hues in a sunset where none existed like is the status quo in many circles today, many of we outdoor experienced people can easily notice the result is beyond anything one might expect could occur on planet Earth and deny its truth while instead assigning it a category of creative visual art. </p>

</p>

<p >David Senesac</p>

<p ><b>Signature URL removed. Not allowed per Photo.net Terms of Use.</b></p>

[lou korell]

<p>A photograph is a photograph. Truth is truth. They are not the same.</p>

[simon_foubert]

<p>It's still and always will be worth pursuing truth via photography ... because the viewing public wants to believe in the truthfulness of the photographic image.<br>

Of course there is artistic truthfulness ... and documentary truthfulness. But do not both rely in the end on integrity? The <em>trompe-l'oeil</em> works precisely because we can see that it is what it is.</p>

 

[jtk]

<p>Look again at Daniel Bayer's photo of Chuck Close (above) and portraits in his P.N gallery...such as Jessye Norman's and Jane Goodall's. "Truth" is sometimes self-evident, as somebody suggested in 1776.</p>

[Wouter Willemse]

<p>A lot of long hot debating, and now for a question I see completely unasked and unanswered: what do you think truth is anyway? Is the truth absolute, like a Platonic Idea, or is it personalised interpretation, and therefore not "shared" between minds? So, when pursuing "truth", I'll just have to ask you: which truth? <br>

At the risk of insulting the philosophical nature of this forum: isn't a photo what and how you saw something as a photographer, and as such, part of your personal truth?</p>

<p>Yes, it's good to look for that truth, because it enables you to record the world as you see and perceive it.</p>

<p>It is, in my view, bad to hunt for a "global truth" (the absolute type) through photography: it would be terribly pedantic. Consider, for example, in some cultures, white is the colour of mourning and black the one for festivities. In other cultures, the other way around. The background of the viewer will have mental values attached to colours defined by his/her cultural background. So the way they perceive your photos will be different, effectively ending the singular message it would need to be a "global truth". So don't even try. Simpler put: your pictures are not my truth.</p>

[frankie_bellocchio]

<p>this thread is already way too advanced for me to read through all the replies, so i appologise if this has already been said (fairly sure it will have been), but photography was NEVER about truthful representation of real life even from the start (somethign i consider fairly impossible), so its not like the introduction of new technologies has had such a huge effect... beyond just highlighting this fact.</p>

[william l. palminteri]

<blockquote>

<p ><a href="../photodb/user?user_id=5184930"><em>Johnny Martyr</em></a><em> </em><a href="../member-status-icons"><em><img title="Frequent poster" src="http://static.photo.net/v3graphics/member-status-icons/2rolls.gif" alt="" /></em></a><em>, Jul 06, 2009; 03:40 p.m.</em></p>

 

<p><em>i feel as though photography has gotten to be more akin to painting than documentation. </em></p>

 

<p><em>subjects readily strike celeb-stolen poses as soon as a camera is pointed at them. widespread use of editing has made it increasingly rare to see photos of people with blemishes, stretch marks or other cosmetic 'defects.' hdr and the hyper sharp clarity of digital photography seems to be giving life a hyper real sort of look. and yet with the advancement of digital photography film grain seems increasingly unpopular outside of the musings of photoshoppers out to mimic the look of film. more and more photography seems to have become about pure visual cosmetics and less and less about revealing the electronic/mechanical/optical bias of the perspective of documentation.</em></p>

 

</blockquote>

<p>Johnny, I've been railing about this for years, especially since the de facto standardisation of photoshop, which most photographers consider a necessary part of the film chain.<br>

That's why I shoot mainly unretouched photographs, and when I do edit, I'm not trying to fool anyone.<br>

I shoot for the reality, the soul, grit, funk, the TRUTH of the matter. It's harder that way, but the results are well worth the effort.<br>

And that "hyper-sharp' bit, what's up with THAT?<br>

Those shots look, to me, STUPID phoney, as the kids would say..........</p>

<p>Bill P.</p>

[william l. palminteri]

<blockquote>

<p><a href="http://www.photo.net/photodb/user?user_id=5184930"><em>Johnny Martyr</em></a><em> </em><a href="http://www.photo.net/member-status-icons"><em><img title="Frequent poster" src="http://static.photo.net/v3graphics/member-status-icons/2rolls.gif" alt="" /></em></a><em>, Jul 09, 2009; 02:04 p.m.</em><br>

<em>and i also agree that the introduction of the personal computer to photography has diluted the once longer thought-out, deliberate decisions people used to make in regards to how it is practiced. this is not to say editing itself is bad or auto focus is bad. this is to say that these commodities reduce the need for the shooter to commit him/herself to certain principles and methods. the lack of principle is probably more what i'm fighting than the inability of the camera to accurately convey truth. i think this is really just an excuse for not bothering to be concerned with honest photography.</em><br>

<em></em></p>

</blockquote>

<p>ansel was sucking the soul out of the craft long before computers made it a push button breeze.<br>

I enjoy making the commitment. That's why I publish (mainly) unretouched photographs. They're not "perfet", neither was the subject, neither is life.</p>

<p>Bill P.</p>