In his essay The Ontology of the Photographic Image, Andre Bazin argues that photography surpasses other forms of visual art because of its ability to capture reality. I agree with Bazin in that in a technical sense photography does surpass other forms of visual art. Photography is able to capture something exactly the way we see it. Photographs are more realistic than paintings because the images produced are exact copies of what was photographed. Bazin writes, "The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it." Painting on the other hand, is a direct reflection of the painter. The image produced isn't the "object itself", it becomes what the painter wants the object to be.
Sadly, the photographic image has become less and less realistic. With things like Photoshop becoming so common, one must think twice whether the image he/she is looking at is in fact real. Recently, there was media buzz about a Ralph Lauren ad that was Photoshopped so that the model looked thinner than she actually was. Just like in paintings the image produced has become what the photographer wants the object to be and not how it really is.
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Katrina: I would draw your attention to the passage on the bottom of page 241, where Bazin notes that even if the photographic image is a bad one, i.e. "fuzzy," "distorted," or "discolored," for him it is still precious. Why? Because even a bad photograph still indexes what was "really there" at a point in time, still shares its origin with something real in the world.
ReplyDeleteIn response to your point about the increasing use of photo manipulation, I think of another scandal many years ago when Kate Winslet appeared on the cover of GQ magazine. The magazine editors decided to Photoshop her legs to make her look thinner, and Winslet actually went public to say that that was not how she looked!
Also, Prof. Hany Farid in Computer Science at Dartmouth does some interesting research on detecting modern image forgery:
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~farid/research/
I recall the famous instance when Time magazine "photoshopped" a picture of Saddam Hussein so that his moustasche looked like Stalin's.
ReplyDelete@Alenda: It is an interesting passage you mentioned, but I don't think that Bazin predicted that people would intentionally miscolor or distort images to give a different impression. I think that what he meant in that passage was that in the event of a photograph becoming distorted in some way, the distortion itself will create a memory of its own, adding to the "nostalgic" quality of the image. However, photo manipulation on the scale we see today is probably not what Bazin imagined.