Is this just a Photo?
Toronto Winter City Festival – Angel of the Apocalypse Exhibit by the Flaming Lotus Girls
I have been blithely producing this series of Olympic Plugin articles without asking a very relevant question – when is a picture more than just a picture? By that I mean in the process of doing photo-taking and photo-finishing a simple image can become a crafted production nothing like the moment in 1/50th of a second in time it is intended to capture. This is even more true using one or more of the currently recommended Olympic Plugins [and there a lot more Olympic Plugin reviews on tap in the next few weeks]. So while doing the articles I have had lingering thoughts about what makes up a true, real and legitimate picture.
Toronto Close-up from Angel of the Apocalypse Exhibit by the Flaming Lotus Girls
Here is the essential question. When, in the process of taking a picture with the aid of props, zoom lenses, and blitz flash attachments among other things, does the image change from a moment in time to a carefully crafted statement of what was seen? If a picture is worth a thousand words, is a carefully photo-finished or ‘hand crafted’ image production worth a million words [or dollars]? Or is a picture still a picture up until the moment it leaves the camera[or SD card] and is taken into Photoshop [or your favorite image/photo editing program] and then cropped, color corrected, sharpened, and/or smoothed to meet your remembrances of what it looked like when you took the image?
Another Close-up from Angel of the Apocalypse Exhibit at Toronto Winter City Festival
Or does an image not cross the line from photo to statement until one adds a new layer or a completely different image element into a composition? Say splice on a second viewpoint for a panorama view. Or cutout a portion of an image and then recombine and re-merge the pure elements into a “tighter” view of the scene. This is deliberate distortion of the reality of the scene; therefore this must be a true, realistic image changed to a statement about what was seen and felt. And is one required to make the statements explicit – so no none could be deceived into thinking that this “altered” image was in fact a true rendering of reality?
Redline from Angel of the Apocalypse Exhibit at Toronto Winter City Festival
Now to my surprise, I discovered yesterday that the people at Popular Photography and the New York Times David Pogue have been tending the same garden. I have always thought of photography as a moment in time – a slice of life. To me Photography is to video/movies as a poem is to a novel. And then the obvious became apparent. Photography is inevitability a statement about what one values. Indeed capturing a value to be perhaps shared with others or at other times.