I am (frequently) on the record as stating that process doesn't matter, results are all that matters.
That's perhaps not quite right. Your process does matter. It matters to you. Whatever makes you happy, whatever allows you to make the results that you want, that's yours and you can love it or hate it as much as you want. If you can't make what you want without using expired TriX, then use expired TriX. That's great! That's what it's all about, really. It's you, working your way through your process, to produce results that you're happy with.
The thing is that your process does not matter to anyone else. There is one (1) notable exception to this, art buyers sometimes are rather fond of process. They value difficult processes and outré processes over more ordinary ones. This is some sort of extension of the desire for provenance, I think, and is a generalized form of "a real Vermeer is worth a great deal more than van Meegeren" in some sense.
This has an unfortunate consequence in the photography world. When you post some picture or another and note the process in loving detail: Expired Kodak FooChrome stand developed for 12 months in Campbell's Tomato Soup 1:100000, or similar, it feels like you're marketing to the art buyer set. Since the picture is invariably kind of crappy, the overall effect is rather lame. It feels like you want me to value this turd as a piece of high end art.
It's not, it's a turd. The reason it's a turd is because you're more interested in developing expired film in dilute tomato soup than you are in making pictures. That's fine, whatever floats your boat. See the second paragraph in this little essay. The result, though, isn't anything anyone wants to look at.
Yes, there are obviously exceptions, Some people make exceptional photographs and develop them in Caffenol. Not, however, very damn many.
Keep your process to yourself, unless someone asks. The art buyers will ask, don't worry.
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
The Steerage Redux
Here is a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, which I have examined before in these pages.
I suggested previously that it was something of a rule follower, which it is to an extent. Understood in terms of classical composition rather than modern photographic "composition", though, it completely falls into place. The excellence is immediately understood as a consequence of the photo's adherence to visual ideas that we simply work. The "rule of thirds" has nothing to do with it.
There are many lines in the picture, none of them quite parallel, and none of them quite perpendicular, but certainly grouped into more-or-less vertical, and more-or-less horizontal. The lines give interest and a sense of regularity without being tedious and repetitious. There is a bright white spot in the hat, and a sightline from the white-hatted man down to black-headed figures in the steerage connecting that light spot to the darker spots below. There is a light region, contrasting with a dark region. There are spots of light and dark in echoed configurations. There is even a strongly pyramidal collection in the darker mass of the steerage topped by the man in the white hat.
Viewed as a nineteenth century painting, this thing is practically textbook (except for the subject matter).
The point here is that there are a bunch of elements which we recognize after the fact as being part of many successful compositions, and they have been applied here with excellent taste and balance. There is variety, and there is unity. There is visual balance. You can't really measure these things, but you can see them when they are present, and you can to a degree learn to apply them yourself. There is no royal road to a good composition, but there are some signposts, some blazes on the trail.
Ultimately, you simply have to learn to see it yourself by looking at a bunch of pictures, and to do it yourself by taking a lot of pictures, mostly bad.
I suggested previously that it was something of a rule follower, which it is to an extent. Understood in terms of classical composition rather than modern photographic "composition", though, it completely falls into place. The excellence is immediately understood as a consequence of the photo's adherence to visual ideas that we simply work. The "rule of thirds" has nothing to do with it.
There are many lines in the picture, none of them quite parallel, and none of them quite perpendicular, but certainly grouped into more-or-less vertical, and more-or-less horizontal. The lines give interest and a sense of regularity without being tedious and repetitious. There is a bright white spot in the hat, and a sightline from the white-hatted man down to black-headed figures in the steerage connecting that light spot to the darker spots below. There is a light region, contrasting with a dark region. There are spots of light and dark in echoed configurations. There is even a strongly pyramidal collection in the darker mass of the steerage topped by the man in the white hat.
Viewed as a nineteenth century painting, this thing is practically textbook (except for the subject matter).
The point here is that there are a bunch of elements which we recognize after the fact as being part of many successful compositions, and they have been applied here with excellent taste and balance. There is variety, and there is unity. There is visual balance. You can't really measure these things, but you can see them when they are present, and you can to a degree learn to apply them yourself. There is no royal road to a good composition, but there are some signposts, some blazes on the trail.
Ultimately, you simply have to learn to see it yourself by looking at a bunch of pictures, and to do it yourself by taking a lot of pictures, mostly bad.
Friday, May 24, 2013
Andrew's Composition Course
Go get a free edition of Henry Peach Robinson's Pictorial effect in photography from Google Books.
Now google up a web site or two of great paintings. Many museums have a web site with a searchable collection. You don't need great reproductions of paintings, but you want decent ones. Poke around a bit until you can definitely find a bunch of pictures that you pretty much like, from anywhere between the 1400s to the 1800s. Sure, that's not all the paintings in the world, but they're the ones that will make sense in this context.
Skim over the little section of background I provide below.
Start reading Robinson. When he mentions a painting, use google to find a copy of it to look at before you read on, and take a look at the picture.
Keep reading until the end.
What you read will be somewhat dated, not everything should be taken as gospel truth. Robinson had some ideas about photography that are pretty old fashioned, and other ideas that are so modern that they are only now being viewed as acceptable (again).
When you get to the end, which should take a handful of hours, you will have learned more about composition than a 100 years spent on crummy web sites with their rotten Rule of Thirds and Golden Ratios, and their terrible terrible sample pictures.
Background:
Robinson was writing in the nineteenth century, when film did not exist. Emulsions were coated on to glass plates, instead. Exposure times were long, measured in many seconds, so moving subjects was a big no-no. People had to hold still. For portraits, a head-rest was used, to assist the subject in not moving.
Emulsions were also orthochromatic, which means that it was more or less impossible to take a photograph that included a decent rendering of clouds and landscape at the same time. The sky was normally white in a landscape photograph, without compositing together multiple images.
The long exposure times meant that shutters as we know them did not exist. One simply removed the lens cap, counted for a bit, and then put the lens cap back on.
Chiaroscuro means, basically, the arrangement of light and shadow in a picture.
Now google up a web site or two of great paintings. Many museums have a web site with a searchable collection. You don't need great reproductions of paintings, but you want decent ones. Poke around a bit until you can definitely find a bunch of pictures that you pretty much like, from anywhere between the 1400s to the 1800s. Sure, that's not all the paintings in the world, but they're the ones that will make sense in this context.
Skim over the little section of background I provide below.
Start reading Robinson. When he mentions a painting, use google to find a copy of it to look at before you read on, and take a look at the picture.
Keep reading until the end.
What you read will be somewhat dated, not everything should be taken as gospel truth. Robinson had some ideas about photography that are pretty old fashioned, and other ideas that are so modern that they are only now being viewed as acceptable (again).
When you get to the end, which should take a handful of hours, you will have learned more about composition than a 100 years spent on crummy web sites with their rotten Rule of Thirds and Golden Ratios, and their terrible terrible sample pictures.
Background:
Robinson was writing in the nineteenth century, when film did not exist. Emulsions were coated on to glass plates, instead. Exposure times were long, measured in many seconds, so moving subjects was a big no-no. People had to hold still. For portraits, a head-rest was used, to assist the subject in not moving.
Emulsions were also orthochromatic, which means that it was more or less impossible to take a photograph that included a decent rendering of clouds and landscape at the same time. The sky was normally white in a landscape photograph, without compositing together multiple images.
The long exposure times meant that shutters as we know them did not exist. One simply removed the lens cap, counted for a bit, and then put the lens cap back on.
Chiaroscuro means, basically, the arrangement of light and shadow in a picture.
Book Review: Pictorial effect in photography
This is a book by Henry Peach Robinson, one of the original "Pictorialists" in the late nineteenth century. It's a book that's available free through Google's books section, being long out of copyright and having been scanned by those folks. There's actually a couple of editions available as PDFs or other eBooks.
Pictorialism has been declared a terrible idea and dead as a doornail for something like 80 to 100 years as of this writing. It was replaced by the Modernism, or something. Ansel Adams, as a fallen-away Pictorialist, is trotted out as an example of the new thing as contrasted with the old thing. The old thing is usually represented with some muddy blurs, and the new thing with crisp, sharp, contrasty images. It's of interest to me because I think I might be becoming a Pictorialist, although I am not really in favor of muddy blurs.
All of this context makes reading this book pretty interesting, since (for instance) Ansel Adams landscape work appears for all the world to be reading directly from Robinson's playbook. Virtually any Adams landscape makes a marvelous illustration of virtually any point Robinson makes.
All that aside, though, this is a fine little volume with a great deal to say about composition. Robinson's taste runs the gamut from sentimental to twee, and many of his ideas are a bit dated; but this can largely be ignored. The bulk of the book is a truly excellent primer on composition. It's a quick read, with many examples, and it doesn't mention a Golden Ratio anywhere, thankfully. The material in the book is clearly lifted from orthodox (in 1860ish) theory on painting, which is no surprise since Robinson was trained as a painter. Robinson does make a serious and largely successful effort to translate this material into photographic terms, and to render it applicable to photography.
There's also a fair bit of philosophy of art to be found, in little veins between the technical information. Fact versus Truth is a common theme, and a good one to be thinking about for any would-be artist. Robinson feels that Truth is vital to a photograph, but Fact can be dispensed with. Indeed, he makes a pretty solid argument that Truth is more important to a photograph than to a painting. He does explain what all this means, by the way, and quite ably. Again, here, we find that as many Modernists agree with Robinson as disagree. Weston's photographs certainly told a Truth, always, without necessarily being Factual. No surprise, Weston was another fallen-away Pictorialist.
Nowhere in this book does Robinson advocate the murky blurs that usually held up as examples of Pictorialism. On the contrary, he's all about depth of field, detail, and a full range of tonal values. He merely wants the photographer to manage these things carefully instead of dumping endless masses of equi-potent detail into our eyes. Robinson does advocate compositing of images, but this appears as much to be to overcome technical problems with the emulsions he was working with as anything else. Where Robinson cuts and pastes, Adams dodges and burns, Adams having access to panchromatic film.
The book is filled with amusing quotations and remarks, and references to other work. There is a wealth of detail which gives a bit of historical insight into the working of a nineteenth century photographer. And, there's a bit of straight-up bitching about bad photographers mucking things up, now that it's all so easy to take pictures, what with these new-fangled dry plates. While he doesn't use the term fauxtographer, he would have if it had been around. Same as it ever was.
This book is completely worth reading, whether you're an expert or a newbie. It's fun, it's informative, it's short, and it's free.
Pictorialism has been declared a terrible idea and dead as a doornail for something like 80 to 100 years as of this writing. It was replaced by the Modernism, or something. Ansel Adams, as a fallen-away Pictorialist, is trotted out as an example of the new thing as contrasted with the old thing. The old thing is usually represented with some muddy blurs, and the new thing with crisp, sharp, contrasty images. It's of interest to me because I think I might be becoming a Pictorialist, although I am not really in favor of muddy blurs.
All of this context makes reading this book pretty interesting, since (for instance) Ansel Adams landscape work appears for all the world to be reading directly from Robinson's playbook. Virtually any Adams landscape makes a marvelous illustration of virtually any point Robinson makes.
All that aside, though, this is a fine little volume with a great deal to say about composition. Robinson's taste runs the gamut from sentimental to twee, and many of his ideas are a bit dated; but this can largely be ignored. The bulk of the book is a truly excellent primer on composition. It's a quick read, with many examples, and it doesn't mention a Golden Ratio anywhere, thankfully. The material in the book is clearly lifted from orthodox (in 1860ish) theory on painting, which is no surprise since Robinson was trained as a painter. Robinson does make a serious and largely successful effort to translate this material into photographic terms, and to render it applicable to photography.
There's also a fair bit of philosophy of art to be found, in little veins between the technical information. Fact versus Truth is a common theme, and a good one to be thinking about for any would-be artist. Robinson feels that Truth is vital to a photograph, but Fact can be dispensed with. Indeed, he makes a pretty solid argument that Truth is more important to a photograph than to a painting. He does explain what all this means, by the way, and quite ably. Again, here, we find that as many Modernists agree with Robinson as disagree. Weston's photographs certainly told a Truth, always, without necessarily being Factual. No surprise, Weston was another fallen-away Pictorialist.
Nowhere in this book does Robinson advocate the murky blurs that usually held up as examples of Pictorialism. On the contrary, he's all about depth of field, detail, and a full range of tonal values. He merely wants the photographer to manage these things carefully instead of dumping endless masses of equi-potent detail into our eyes. Robinson does advocate compositing of images, but this appears as much to be to overcome technical problems with the emulsions he was working with as anything else. Where Robinson cuts and pastes, Adams dodges and burns, Adams having access to panchromatic film.
The book is filled with amusing quotations and remarks, and references to other work. There is a wealth of detail which gives a bit of historical insight into the working of a nineteenth century photographer. And, there's a bit of straight-up bitching about bad photographers mucking things up, now that it's all so easy to take pictures, what with these new-fangled dry plates. While he doesn't use the term fauxtographer, he would have if it had been around. Same as it ever was.
This book is completely worth reading, whether you're an expert or a newbie. It's fun, it's informative, it's short, and it's free.
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Free Business Idea
As of this writing, flickr has switching things around. Now everyone gets a free terabyte of storage for their photos. Conservatively, this means that everyone can store 100,000 high resolution images in their flickr account (assuming I have done the math right). Somehow, this is seen as a good thing. 100,000 images is just about as useful as 0. 10,000 images is similarly useless.
People who have not thought it through think that the digital photography problem is simply reliably storing all the pictures. This is not in fact the problem. The problem is the same as the backup/restore problem - it's the restore that's tricky, it's the restore that must work. Similarly, storing pictures is easy, it's getting them back and looking at them that is hard.
The predominant model for online picture storage is chronological. 1000 pictures, 10000, 100000, all turn into the same thing: the most recent 30 or 40 pictures. Sure, you can click back in time, but you don't as a general rule. Even when you do, you go back a couple hundred pictures and then start dipping in randomly for another few dozen and then you quit.
The problem is not one of storage, it is of curation. Or, more bluntly, the digital photography problem is a problem of throwing things away.
So, here's the business idea: 50pictures.com or similar. Users can store up to, say, 200 images. They can organize and sort and fuss around with their portfolio. However, they cannot show to the world more than 50. You have to select the 50 for display, and once you hit the limit, you have to deselect one before you can put another one up. You can only select 5 pictures a day for display, so no slideshows.
People who have not thought it through think that the digital photography problem is simply reliably storing all the pictures. This is not in fact the problem. The problem is the same as the backup/restore problem - it's the restore that's tricky, it's the restore that must work. Similarly, storing pictures is easy, it's getting them back and looking at them that is hard.
The predominant model for online picture storage is chronological. 1000 pictures, 10000, 100000, all turn into the same thing: the most recent 30 or 40 pictures. Sure, you can click back in time, but you don't as a general rule. Even when you do, you go back a couple hundred pictures and then start dipping in randomly for another few dozen and then you quit.
The problem is not one of storage, it is of curation. Or, more bluntly, the digital photography problem is a problem of throwing things away.
So, here's the business idea: 50pictures.com or similar. Users can store up to, say, 200 images. They can organize and sort and fuss around with their portfolio. However, they cannot show to the world more than 50. You have to select the 50 for display, and once you hit the limit, you have to deselect one before you can put another one up. You can only select 5 pictures a day for display, so no slideshows.
Monday, May 20, 2013
On Rules of Composition
Let me begin by distinguishing between "rules of composition" and "principles and techniques of composition" in what is perhaps a bit of an arbitrary way. By a rule I mean something like the rule of thirds, or the golden spiral. Something that tells you specifically how to arrange things in the frame. A principle or technique might be to "use leading lines" or "lead the eye to the subject" or "balance visual masses within the frame". A rule tells you where to put things in the frame, a principle tells you how people look at pictures. There's probably overlap. Such is life.
Poking around various web sites for these "rules" is always an exercise in hilarity. You'll find examples of "rule of thirds" with lines carefully drawn through the subject, and nowhere near a one-third line, you'll find ludicrously squashed golden spirals. You'll find golden triangles proudly drawn on top of examples images that bear no graphical relation to the drawn figure whatsoever.
Why do I care about rules of composition, today? I'm interested in whether "good photographs" tend to use these things or not. I'm also interested in, when we examine a "good photograph" for rule compliance, to what extent are we doing ex post facto fitting of patterns to reality, and to what extent the photograph actually deployed some rule or another.
There are two ways to approach this, or perhaps two ends to a spectrum of ways. One can say that in order to be judged "compliant with a rule" the main subject and other elements must be exactly placed according to the rule. One can also allow a moderate degree of latitude, and say that the main subject and other elements must only be placed approximately in the right places to be deemed "following such and such a rule".
One gets in to trouble in both directions.
Rules of composition tend to be very crop-sensitive. If you change the crop, the designated locations for subjects and so on move around, sometimes quite dramatically. Surely a great photograph remains great if you shave off 10% on one edge or another? Or at any rate many of them do. If you demand extreme precision in placements, you will find almost no good photographs that follow the rule -- although you will certainly find many postcards and calendars that have the bear's nose, or the boat, or the top of the waterfall slavishly placed exactly on the intersection of two 1/3 lines. These photographs would in general be improved by any crop at all, the more complete the better.
If you permit rough compliance, then many more good pictures will be found to be in compliance with some rule or another. If you have enough rules, you can find one for any occasion. This image:
Shows the subject placements in a 4:3 crop permitted for Golden Triangle, Golden Spiral, and Rule Of Thirds, if we permit a 5% deviation in any direction, which isn't really all that loose. It's not quite "stick the subject anywhere but in the middle and on the edge" but it's inching firmly in that direction. The Golden Spiral doesn't even apply, really, to any crop except the Golden Rectangle, which nobody uses, anyways. You can, of course, apply your rules of placement to a rectangle within the frame, not to the full crop, but at this point all bets are off. Now you have an more or less arbitrary rectangle in the frame, with presumably some slop to it, and then you're putting things inside that rectangle with their own fudge factors.
Why not just say "stick the things that matter in the frame, not at the edges and not in the center, unless there's a good reason for it"? Why not talk about balance of visual masses, eye leading, and so on?
It is absolutely the case that every rule of composition can produce a pleasing balance of forms within the frame. To codify these things as rules, however, is to place the cart well before the horse. We might as well say that to produce an appealing cheese, you should wrap whatever it is you have handy, some milk solids, old clothes, a dead cat, perhaps some mud or a set of house keys to a house you no longer own, in a layer of suitable wax and place the result it in a cave for a few months.
This is, after all, how many excellent cheeses are made. So it works, some of the time.
Poking around various web sites for these "rules" is always an exercise in hilarity. You'll find examples of "rule of thirds" with lines carefully drawn through the subject, and nowhere near a one-third line, you'll find ludicrously squashed golden spirals. You'll find golden triangles proudly drawn on top of examples images that bear no graphical relation to the drawn figure whatsoever.
Why do I care about rules of composition, today? I'm interested in whether "good photographs" tend to use these things or not. I'm also interested in, when we examine a "good photograph" for rule compliance, to what extent are we doing ex post facto fitting of patterns to reality, and to what extent the photograph actually deployed some rule or another.
There are two ways to approach this, or perhaps two ends to a spectrum of ways. One can say that in order to be judged "compliant with a rule" the main subject and other elements must be exactly placed according to the rule. One can also allow a moderate degree of latitude, and say that the main subject and other elements must only be placed approximately in the right places to be deemed "following such and such a rule".
One gets in to trouble in both directions.
Rules of composition tend to be very crop-sensitive. If you change the crop, the designated locations for subjects and so on move around, sometimes quite dramatically. Surely a great photograph remains great if you shave off 10% on one edge or another? Or at any rate many of them do. If you demand extreme precision in placements, you will find almost no good photographs that follow the rule -- although you will certainly find many postcards and calendars that have the bear's nose, or the boat, or the top of the waterfall slavishly placed exactly on the intersection of two 1/3 lines. These photographs would in general be improved by any crop at all, the more complete the better.
If you permit rough compliance, then many more good pictures will be found to be in compliance with some rule or another. If you have enough rules, you can find one for any occasion. This image:
Why not just say "stick the things that matter in the frame, not at the edges and not in the center, unless there's a good reason for it"? Why not talk about balance of visual masses, eye leading, and so on?
It is absolutely the case that every rule of composition can produce a pleasing balance of forms within the frame. To codify these things as rules, however, is to place the cart well before the horse. We might as well say that to produce an appealing cheese, you should wrap whatever it is you have handy, some milk solids, old clothes, a dead cat, perhaps some mud or a set of house keys to a house you no longer own, in a layer of suitable wax and place the result it in a cave for a few months.
This is, after all, how many excellent cheeses are made. So it works, some of the time.
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Truth, Photographs, and the Media
I have beaten this little drum before, I think. As of this writing, though, we have yet another scandal about such and such a press photograph was allegedly faked in some as-yet undetermined fashion, etcetera and so forth. So, I feel like it's time for another round.
Photojournalism isn't. This discussion is at least 30 years old, and probably 30 years dead, but nobody seems to remember it. Some photo is shown to be manipulated to a greater or lesser extent. Shock and dismay is registered. The photographer and/or editor are duly pilloried and Media Standards For Photographic Manipulation are dutifully rolled out to remind us that the press adheres to strict rules to guarantee that only True Photographs will be shown to you. The system has worked, Untruth has been stamped out again. Phew!
This is all crap, designed to make the Media look honest, designed to bolster their fantasy of being purveyors of objective truth. It's simply not true.
Photojournalism isn't. It isn't journalism, that is. A photograph can show you What, and maybe hint at How. It leaves out Who, Where, When and the most important one of all, Why. Photos are, by their very definition, a frame around a tiny fraction of what it true at an instant in time, removed from all context and presented to us. Truth, and journalistic Truth in particular, is almost entirely about context. It's about how these things fit into the larger world, it's about why these things are happening.
A photograph feels like Truth, because it is a literal tracing of something that was actually there in front of the camera. In that sense, it is true. Media Standards For Manipulation are all about preserving this trivial and uninteresting truth. Essentially, you can't print a photograph in the press unless the stuff that appears to be in the photo was actually there. So what?
A photograph, by the its power of apparent Truth, is as likely to distort as to reveal. A photograph makes us believe it, so if it is lying to us, that lie has far more power than if someone simply wrote the lie down.
The press loves photographs for their power. Someone writes a piece about something or other, presumably striving to be Truthful. There's still a narrative there, one or more ideas are presented. So-and-so are a bunch of Bad Dudes, or something. Whether it's True or not, whether that even means anything, that's irrelevant to the current discussion. The point is, the photo editor or someone sorts through the available pictures and selects a picture to support the story. They select a picture, perhaps, of one of the so-and-so's, in which it appears that the dude is in fact being a Bad Dude. We read the story, or at least the first bit. We learn that we're supposed to think so-and-so are a bunch of Bad Dudes and, my goodness, here is proof! The newspaper has guaranteed us that this picture is of a genuine so-and-so, and that he is indeed Being A Bad Dude. The backs up the text, and gives us a much stronger impression that so-and-so are in fact a bunch of Bad Dudes. This despite the fact that the picture shows us one (1) so-and-so out of perhaps millions, in one instant of time, apparently being a Bad Dude. The photograph is not meaningful supporting evidence at all, but it certainly acts upon us as if it were.
You can lie with a crop just as easily as with an erasure. You can lie by choosing to run this photograph instead of that photograph as easily as with a crop.
Photojournalism isn't. This discussion is at least 30 years old, and probably 30 years dead, but nobody seems to remember it. Some photo is shown to be manipulated to a greater or lesser extent. Shock and dismay is registered. The photographer and/or editor are duly pilloried and Media Standards For Photographic Manipulation are dutifully rolled out to remind us that the press adheres to strict rules to guarantee that only True Photographs will be shown to you. The system has worked, Untruth has been stamped out again. Phew!
This is all crap, designed to make the Media look honest, designed to bolster their fantasy of being purveyors of objective truth. It's simply not true.
Photojournalism isn't. It isn't journalism, that is. A photograph can show you What, and maybe hint at How. It leaves out Who, Where, When and the most important one of all, Why. Photos are, by their very definition, a frame around a tiny fraction of what it true at an instant in time, removed from all context and presented to us. Truth, and journalistic Truth in particular, is almost entirely about context. It's about how these things fit into the larger world, it's about why these things are happening.
A photograph feels like Truth, because it is a literal tracing of something that was actually there in front of the camera. In that sense, it is true. Media Standards For Manipulation are all about preserving this trivial and uninteresting truth. Essentially, you can't print a photograph in the press unless the stuff that appears to be in the photo was actually there. So what?
A photograph, by the its power of apparent Truth, is as likely to distort as to reveal. A photograph makes us believe it, so if it is lying to us, that lie has far more power than if someone simply wrote the lie down.
The press loves photographs for their power. Someone writes a piece about something or other, presumably striving to be Truthful. There's still a narrative there, one or more ideas are presented. So-and-so are a bunch of Bad Dudes, or something. Whether it's True or not, whether that even means anything, that's irrelevant to the current discussion. The point is, the photo editor or someone sorts through the available pictures and selects a picture to support the story. They select a picture, perhaps, of one of the so-and-so's, in which it appears that the dude is in fact being a Bad Dude. We read the story, or at least the first bit. We learn that we're supposed to think so-and-so are a bunch of Bad Dudes and, my goodness, here is proof! The newspaper has guaranteed us that this picture is of a genuine so-and-so, and that he is indeed Being A Bad Dude. The backs up the text, and gives us a much stronger impression that so-and-so are in fact a bunch of Bad Dudes. This despite the fact that the picture shows us one (1) so-and-so out of perhaps millions, in one instant of time, apparently being a Bad Dude. The photograph is not meaningful supporting evidence at all, but it certainly acts upon us as if it were.
You can lie with a crop just as easily as with an erasure. You can lie by choosing to run this photograph instead of that photograph as easily as with a crop.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)