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LP&E : Assignment 4, Rework

Critical Essay - Grey Areas: The Ethics of Skies and other manipulations

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clouds
Box A
Lukas Gallo,
The South Bohemian region of the Czech Republic is treated to fluctus, a wave formation caused when wind above a cloud blows faster than the wind inside
© Lukas Gallo/Caters News
image source: The Times

This subject arose from the coincidence of an advertising campaign for Luminar AI sky replacement software and reading in Part One of Victorian landscape photographers printing two negatives together, one exposed for the land or sea and the other for the sky (Wells, 2011, pp.33, 306).
Image manipulation, in many forms, has played a part in photographic practices from its inception to the current day. This essay will examine some of the methods used, the reasons for their use and the ethical issues that surround them. The study will begin with skies and extend to other aspects.

Whenever a photograph is taken, there are choices of position, framing and timing; with more versatile equipment, the photographer may have additional options such as focal length, focus, depth of field, shutter speed, filters; and perhaps, film stock 1 and lighting. All these choices are exercised before or at the moment of exposure and all rest on the fundamental matter of subject — what is at the object end of the lens.

Many of the more controversial choices occur after exposure and these may arise from or be limited by pre-exposure decisions.

Skies present a useful starting point because it can be argued that the Victorians' separate sky exposures were a technically optimal procedure arising from the limitations of the media in use. C.E.K. Mees wrote, in a book published posthumously,

All of the early processes were principally sensitive to the blue/violet end of the spectrum. In contrast the human eye is most sensitive to yellow/green light. As a result a false, or at least different, colour rendering was produced in a photograph; blue objects appeared much lighter and yellow objects much darker. Mees, 1961, summarised in Early Photography, n.d.

Research into lost oil paintings provide a tangential but illustrative insight on chromatic imbalance even decades after the Victorian era. In the early 1990s, Frans Postma set out to recreate Mondrian's Paris studio at 26 Rue du Départ, including the paintings and the many primary-coloured cardboard squares that he periodically rearranged on his studio walls. Working from photographs taken in 1926 by Paul Delbo and, as control, an extant painting now at the Tate, Postma was mystified by yellow blocks on the painting appearing as black on the photographs. This was eventually traced to an Eastern bloc film,

A type of film was described which was meant for portrait photography, but was found to be unsatisfactory. This film was soon taken off the market. The negative material was more or less insensitive to yellow and very sensitive to blue. Postma & Boekraad, 1995, pp. 59, 92

Another difficulty with early emulsions, that of rendering the dynamic range of landscapes, was described, again by Mees, writing 50 years earlier in The photography of coloured objects (a slim volume published largely to promote Wratten Panchromatic Plates and filters 2)

the sky is usually of much greater intensity than any other portion of the gradation scale, and it follows that, in order to obtain detail in the shadows (seen by the eye because of the expansion of the iris), it is often necessary to over-expose the sky.
This over-exposure, which destroys differences in intensity which are perceived by the eye (clouds for instance), can be removed by the use of contrast colour screens, which, by absorbing the sky light, seem, in certain cases, to lengthen the scale of intensities which the plate is capable of rendering. Mees, 1909, p.52

For Victorian photographers, the problems were exacerbated by very slow emulsions requiring long exposures and while the chromatic and speed issues were eventually resolved by the development of fast, panchromatic films, dealing with the dynamic range of some subjects can still be a problem. A common solution nowadays is the use of graduated filters to vary the light intensity reaching different areas of the film or sensor. These filters offer a similar but more subtle (by virtue of the graduation) effect as the Victorian double negative sandwich. Another approach is to bracket the exposures and combine the images either in post-processing (from an analogue or digital source) or in-camera (digital only): high dynamic range (HDR) digital composites can result in excessively garish images in which the outcome does not resemble the original scene.

In the 1961 Mees quote above, he describes how "the human eye" differs from cameras in processing light input. If a landscape photographer’s purpose in a particular project is to depict a subject and its environment accurately in terms of dynamic range, colour rendition and so on, that is, how their own eyes see it, then it can be argued logically that the technical strategies examined so far are legitimate means to that end. (Not to pursue this aim of verisimilitude may be a conscious choice with - presumably - some aesthetic, political or other overriding purpose or it may be an act of simple carelessness or ignorance.)
There are parallels in journalistic and documentary photography where various codes of ethics have been published, for example that of the Associated Press (2022),

Minor adjustments to photos are acceptable. These include cropping, dodging and burning, conversion into grayscale, elimination of dust on camera sensors and scratches on scanned negatives or scanned prints and normal toning and color adjustments. These should be limited to those minimally necessary for clear and accurate reproduction and that restore the authentic nature of the photograph. Changes in density, contrast, color and saturation levels that substantially alter the original scene are not acceptable. Associated Press, 2022

Interventions going far beyond these standards, both in technical manipulation and physical interference with the subject, have been evidenced from the nineteenth century to the present day, from Alexander Gardner rearranging corpses on American Civil War battlefields and Roger Fenton rearranging cannon balls in the Crimea (Bogre, 2019, p.26 and Morris, 2010) to Brian Walski combining images in Basra in 2003 and Narciso Contreras digitally removing elements from an image of the Syrian conflict in 2013 (Bogre, 2019, pp.64-65). High standards are clearly expected of photojournalists and these are fiercely enforced when malpractice is found, but is there any read-across to landscape photography?

Le Gray
Box B
Gustave Le Gray,
The Great Wave, 1857
image source: V&A

Taking up the example of skies, again, the key question must be, "is it the same sky?". There is a difference in kind between, on the one hand, replacing a sky with that from an archive image made elsewhere, or from someone else's photograph or through digital generation and, on the other hand, combining bracketed sequential exposures of the same scene. The V&A's web site includes a page arising from their 2003 exhibition, Sea and Sky: Photographs by Gustave Le Gray 1856-1857 which states that Le Gray was a pioneer in the, "combination of two negatives … to achieve tonal balance between sea and sky on the final print. It gives a more truthful sense of how the eye, rather than the camera, perceives nature" (my emphasis), but see Misrach and Weston, below.

The use of bracketed exposures might be considered logically to be within the Associated Press definition of "necessary for clear and accurate reproduction and that restore the authentic nature of the photograph", although the published guidelines (AP, 2022) are silent on the matter. The use of any other skies would clearly be in breach of the code for photojournalism, and while there are no general standards for landscape photographs, some competitions impose restrictions. As an example, the current Landscape Photographer of the Year (LPOTY) competition, limited to UK subjects, includes a number of categories, in most of which,

the integrity of the subject must be maintained and the making of physical changes to the landscape is not permitted.
You may not, for example, remove fences, move trees or strip in the sky from another image, paint the foreground or paint out the background.
Digital adjustments including dodging & burning, changes to tone & contrast and cropping are allowed, as are High Dynamic Range imaging techniques, stitched panoramas and focus stacking. LPOTY, 2022

In LPOTY's Your View category, "digital manipulation is allowed … [it is intended for] images where post-production adjustments have exceeded those allowed in the rules for the other categories" (LPOTY, 2022).

Picking up on the LPOTY rules, a useful definition for the purposes of this essay might be, "the integrity of the subject and its environment must be maintained", thus establishing a benchmark by which any techniques available in the analogue darkroom and their digital equivalents are available, including bracketed exposures, but not the combining of entirely separate images.
When considering what LPOTY refers to as "physical changes" (giving the example of removing fences), a 2010 essay by Gerry Badger notes an important distinction. Badger tells two anecdotes about his reactions to the work of Andreas Gursky. Firstly, regarding an earlier work, his "shock" when he learned that Gursky had "used the computer to 'airbrush' out an entire factory" (p.236) from Rhein, 1996 (fig. C1 is an example from the series) 3. The second concerns a 2005 image of the Bahrain motor racing circuit (fig. C2), where Gursky, in an interview, "[p]ointing to an area at the bottom of the image, … stated that he hadn't particularly liked the actual shape of one of the bends on the track, so he used a computer to alter it. For the same reason, he changed one of the bends at the top of the picture" (p.236). Both the Gursky images (figs. C1 and C2) are undoubtedly landscapes, despite his interventions. He later produced abstract images showing sections of the racetrack (fig. C3). A more conventional aerial view of the circuit is shown for reference (fig. C4).

Gursky Gursky Gursky Bahrain
Box C
1. Andreas Gursky Rhine 1, 1996
2. Andreas Gursky Bahrain I, 2005
3. Andreas Gursky Bahrain II, 2007
4. Unattributed, Bahrain International Circuit Aerial View n.d.
© the artists, their agents or their estates
image sources: 1-3 andreasgursky.com; 4. motorsportguides.com.

Badger (after examining the disparity in market prices between such as, on the one hand Robert Adams and Lee Friedlander, and on the other Gursky and the Düsseldorf School and then the working methods of Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall) suggests that "photography has separated into two parallel worlds … [n]ot art and documentary, but something much more fundamental — between recreating a real world and recreating a fake world."

The term fake might be considered pejorative and implying deception, especially in conjunction with real which has more positive connotations, but that reflects the tenor of Badger's essay in which he disapproves of Gursky's changes and more generally of such practices. If more even-handed terminology is needed perhaps real and artificial will suffice, given this context and one dictionary definition of, "[m]ade by art in imitation of, or as substitute for, what is natural or real" (OED, 1989).

Badger acknowledges that this dichotomy has existed for a long time, and cites the Pictorialists and the Surrealists as working in the fake world, but the ease with which this can now be done digitally causes him concern that what he terms the "manipulative tendency" (p.141) is undermining the documentary value photography once had.

Linking the Pictorialist movements to the gallery photographs of Gursky, the Düsseldorf School, Crewdson, Wall et al. brings together the issues under consideration, because the Pictorialists were at one extreme of the photography as art debate in the nineteenth century, in opposition to the likes of Peter Henry Emerson 4 and Gustave Le Gray who believed in the purity of the negative (or the double negative in Le Gray's case). In A.D. Coleman's essay The Directorial Mode (1976), he writes of the Pictorialists 5,

an attitude toward the medium of photography underlay the pictorial impulse, and that attitude is of great importance. It could be summarized thus: photography is only a means. Whatever tools or methods are required for the full realization of the image as conceived should be at the disposal of the imagemaker, and should not be withheld on the basis of abstract principle. …
Pictorialism, then, was the first photographic movement to oppose the imposition of realism as a moral imperative. The pictorialists felt free to exercise full control over the appearance of the final image/object and, equally, over the event it described. Practitioners staged events - often elaborate ones - for their cameras, and resorted to every device from specially made soft-focus lenses to handwork on the negative in order to produce a final print that matched their vision. Coleman, 1976

The Pictorialist practices described by Coleman, elaborately staged events, apply directly to some works by Crewdson and Wall (figs. D1 and D2) where intervention has gone far beyond tinkering with image details and the entire process, including the creation of subjects, and far-reaching processing interventions are directed by the artist at all stages.

Crewdson Wall
Box D
1. Gregory Crewdson, The Haircut, 2014
2. Jeff Wall, A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993
© the artists, their agents or their estates
image sources: 1. BAPhot; 2. socks-studio.com

Finally, stepping away from broadly aesthetic matters, there are legal and civil ethical issues to consider. There is ample evidence of state and agency use of image manipulation from the early days of photography (see Blackburn 2020 regarding Barnardo’s 1873 and the Suffragists, 1913) but this is centred in portraiture rather than landscape.
On a more mundane but individually important level, The Times reported in October 2021, "Estate agents ‘add shine to house adverts with Photoshop’", demonstrating image manipulation used to attract house buyers. The example shown is from an Irish estate agent and this would be in possible contravention of the Consumer Protection Act 2007 (O’Donoghue, 2021, Citizens Information Board, 2022). The image was withdrawn by the agent after the manipulation was publicised.

Asg4 Asg4
Box E
1. 12 Castlecurragh Vale, Blanchardstown, Dublin Google Streetview, n.d.
2. 12 Castlecurragh Vale, BidX1 estate agent image, 2021
© the artists, their agents or their estates
image sources: The Times, 2021

It has been demonstrated firstly that there were technical justifications in the early days of photography for printing from separate exposures and that some of those justifications still apply today; and secondly that for photojournalistic purposes, strict, restrictive guidelines are necessary to maintain the integrity of the image.
There have always been disagreements over the extent to which the photographer or artist should interfere with the subject matter and the processing of its image and these disagreements still continue. Writing in 1932, Edward Weston listed some of the analogue interventions available, commenting that photography is "not at all seeing in the sense that the eyes see" and further that technical interventions and choices are "all legitimate procedure" 6.

Ultimately, the choice rests entirely with the photographer (or their sponsor), on what they are trying to achieve, and the (often seemingly arbitrary) rules applied to particular markets, arenas and forums. As previously noted, maintenance of the integrity of the subject and its environment is the central issue and in general terms there is a direct and proportional relationship between the amount of interference and the work's position in the documentary / art and real / artificial spectra.

And lastly, regarding the first image shown (fig. A1), despite giving every impression of resulting from inept use of Photoshop’s Clone Stamp tool, it would appear to be a real, not artificial, example of fluctus (Cloud Appreciation Society, 2022).

Notes

1 The photographer's choice of film stock opens a wide range of possibilities, starting with the basic black-and-white or colour. After that, to name just a few of the choices: monochrome includes panchromatic, high contrast, infra-red; colour can be saturated Velvia, more restrained emulsions or again infra-red; then there is the level of visible grain (sometimes inevitable when a high speed film is necessary but always an option). When it comes to printing, the contrast of the paper can be used to complement the negative or to exaggerate a characteristic, the print can be tinted, negatives can be printed to cyanotype or other classic processes.
These are sometimes practical choices but most of them are entirely aesthetic.
There are digital equivalents for all of these, both in-camera and in post processing, but they are sometimes frowned upon — the reasons for and possible justifications for this are outside the scope of this essay and may be considered elsewhere 7.

2 Kodak bought Wratten and Wainwright in 1912 in order to obtain Mees' services: he later moved to Rochester where he established Kodak Laboratories and became the first director of research (Clark, 1961).

3 My personal view of Gursky's removal of a building is that it changes my reaction to the image which would probably have concerned industry despoiling the countryside to become one of pleasure at how rural scenes can call to mind a Rothko. My reaction to learning of this deception (because that is how I initially interpreted it) is displeasure at being misled. This experience reinforces both Badger's notion of real and fake photography and the truth that every viewer interprets every photograph in their own way on the basis of their life to date and that interpretation can change with subsequent events and additional information.

4 Interestingly, Coleman (1976) writes of Emerson that he, "advocated a purist approach to the medium: no interference with the external event, no multiple negatives, no retouching (though, inconsistently, he allowed for the "burning in" of fake clouds, since the real ones would not register on the slow films of the day)".

5 Coleman (1976) concludes, regarding the Pictorialists, "much of the imagery they created was, and is, extremely silly; much of it was, and is still, beautiful and strong".

6 The full text of Edward Weston's quotation is,

Photography as a creative expression—or what you will—must be seeing plus. Seeing alone means factual recording. Photography is not at all seeing in the sense that the eyes see. Our vision is binocular, it is in a continuous state of flux, while the camera captures but a single isolated condition of the moment. Besides, we use lenses of various focal lengths to purposely exaggerate actual seeing; we "overcorrect" color for the same reason. In printing we carry our willful distortion of fact—"seeing"—by using papers to intensify the contrast of the original scene or object. This is all legitimate procedure; but it is not seeing literally, it is seeing with intention, with reason. Edward Weston from Nature, the Great Stimulus, 1932

The Weston quote was published in the Spring 1985 edition of Aperture in an article by Richard Misrach, The Illusion of Fact. The quote is also referenced in Wells (2011, pp. 9, 303) and described as "incisive".

7 Consideration of the acceptability of digital 'imitations' of analogue outcomes is too wide a topic to be dealt with in this essay, which is concerned with interventions in all media, analogue and digital.
On the against imitation side, the impression is often given that digital copying is 'cheating' because it is 'just too easy'. An illustrative entry point might be to consider the actual, qualitative and subjective differences between using analogue InfraRed film, conversion of a digital sensor to IR and Photoshop tinkering to achieve the same end. Similarly, consider analogue film choice, using a Leica Monochrom model and clicking the monochrome option in Photoshop.
It is possible that in the future, with Luminar's instant sky replacement and Photoshop's one-click Neural filters, we may have already passed through a golden age of labour-intensive manual digital manipulation.

STOP PRESS
David Crewe reported on PetaPixel on 16th June that, "Luminar Neo Adds a One-Click Portrait Background Removal Tool — Skylum believes this new tool is perfectly suited for creators who do not have the time to deal with the detailed and tedious editing involved with background removal and masking".


References

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Image Credits

A1 Lukas Gallo, The South Bohemian region of the Czech Republic is treated to fluctus, a wave formation caused when wind above a cloud blows faster than the wind inside, n.d. from The Times, 2 March 2022, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/c1e9bd96-9973-11ec-9146-f58384304017. [Accessed 21 May 2022].

B1 Gustave Le Gray, The Great Wave 1857. [online]. vam.ac.uk. Available from http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/s/gustave-le-grey-exhibition/ [Accessed 16 May 2022].

C1 Andreas Gursky, Rhine 1, 1996. [online]. andreasgursky.com. Available from https://www.andreasgursky.com/en/works [Accessed 18 May 2022].

C2 Andreas Gursky, Bahrain I, 2005. [online]. andreasgursky.com. Available from https://www.andreasgursky.com/en/works [Accessed 18 May 2022].

C3 Andreas Gursky, Bahrain II, 2007. [online]. andreasgursky.com. Available from https://www.andreasgursky.com/en/works [Accessed 18 May 2022].

C4 unattributed, Bahrain International Circuit Aerial View , n.d. [online]. motorsportguides.com. Available from https://motorsportguides.com/bahrain-international-circuit/ [Accessed 18 May 2022].

D1 Gregory Crewdson, The Haircut, 2014. [online]. baphot.co.uk. Available from http://baphot.co.uk/pages_cn/cn_part_5.php#crewdson [Accessed 19 May 2022].

D2 Jeff Wall, A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993. [online]. socks-studio.com. Available from https://socks-studio.com/2017/06/28/jeff-wall-study-for-a-sudden-gust-of-wind-after-hokusai-1993/ [Accessed 19 May 2022].

E1 Google Streetview, 12 Castlecurragh Vale, Blanchardstown, Dublin, n.d. [online]. thetimes.co.uk. Available from https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/estate-agents-add-shine-to-house-adverts-with-photoshop-067xm9r8s [Accessed 30 June 2022].

E2 BidX1, 12 Castlecurragh Vale, 2021. [online]. thetimes.co.uk. Available from https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/estate-agents-add-shine-to-house-adverts-with-photoshop-067xm9r8s [Accessed 30 June 2022].


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