THE ART OF MANIPULATING IMAGES

Cutting out and pasting, composing and inserting, eliminating and substituting. That's the "collage art" of transforming images to make them better, to create wonderful landscapes and to make perfect what is not.

There's nothing new in the art of manipulating images, used in basement darkrooms since the beginning of photography. What digital photography and technology changed is the quantity and the circulation of pictures. An increase in the number of available photos often means a loss in quality and requires more selection.

Ethical implications.

If changing a photo to make it more attractive - brightening images, sharpening focus, adding more or less contrast, colour balance, creating dramatic panoramas, emphasizing the subject of a scene, blurring, making faces prettier - can be accepted by the audience, what is unacceptable is to alter an image with the purpose to manipulate the content.

The problem is when the photo is manipulated and its meaning is changed to deceive the reader. Especially when pictures are used to support the story and give it more credibility.
There's always a line journalists and editors should never go beyond. Digital manipulation is only the latest device to trespass this line.
There are other devices, the use of which was already known before digital photography:

• the selection process itself;
  
• the creation of the scene and "fabrication" the photo - that's the case of Robert Capa's famous "The falling soldier";
  
• the choice of a particular angle;
  
• the process of de-contextualising an image;
• introducing elements and symbols in a picture to make it more dramatic - that's the case of "toy photographers" and the doubts on authenticity of some pictures taken during Lebanon war in 2006.
  

An example
Though I'm not good in doctoring images and I don't like editing pictures - in my opinion, even not perfectly fine pictures are important, since they give an idea of the conditions and the situation the photographer is working it - I've tried to manipulate some photos I took in Afghanistan, on the way from Kabul to the Musahy Valley.

The result is a photo showing a gun and dark smoke in the background, aimed at making people believe that a conflict is going on and Western soldiers are involved in it.

 

To obtain this picture, I've combined Photo 1 - used as background image - and Photo 2 - from which I exported the gun.

 
Photo 1


                                         






  Photo 2




Even without doctoring the pictures I could have deceived the audience, by using photo 1. In fact, the smoke - which is real smoke I photographed in that place at that time - is not consequence of explosions. It comes from a kiln used for bricks, as shown in photo 3.                    

This is to show that even the way pictures are combined or put together can be misleading. Words and captions become essential to avoid misleading context a distorting the meaning.