Photographs: whence veracity?

Photographs are imbued with a certain level of veracity as recordings of the external world. This accuracy is perceived as being at a higher level for photographs than for other two-dimensional representations of the world such as drawings and paintings. Do photographs deserve this attention? Where does the veracity dwell, and from where did it arise?

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Two of the recognized inventors of photography, Louis Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot, had no doubt that their inventions possessed high veracity. Talbot tided his first book The Pencil of Nature (1844-46), and Daguerre called his version of the fixed image an "imprint of nature" and claimed that the daguerreotype "is not merely an instrument which serves to draw Nature; on the contrary it is a chemical and physical process which gives her the power to reproduce herself." (1)

On a day-to-day level, logic dictates that we must accept that a photograph can be used to represent, in some way, the external world as it is perceived, conceived, and understood by humans. People use photographs to represent the real world: for instance, to identify persons (using passports, drivers' licenses), to document results in scientific and medical research, and to illustrate fashion trends. However, using a photograph for illustrative purposes or to verify scientific findings is not the same as accepting that a photograph accurately depicts the external world.

Up until the advent of digital imaging, only a few critics and commentators on photography ever questioned the veracity of photographs. Since the earliest attempts at fixing an image created by light falling onto an emulsion, most of those who have made and viewed these images have been convinced of the inherent veracity that photography supposedly holds in regard to depicting the external world. Since the mid-1800s, the general population has considered photography a better representation of the external world than painting, despite logical evidence to the contrary--until digital technology prompted a re-examination.

The camera obscura had long been used as a tool to aid the accurate drawing of scenes from the external world. With the daguerreotype of 1839, the image from a camera obscura had been fixed, as had been achieved by Joseph Nicephore Niepce as early as 1824 (2) and Talbot in 1839. Photography, as a recording mechanism in the mid-1800s, was different from anything that predated it. Accurate painting and drawing is time consuming and requires skills many people lack. Though preparation of photographic plates also required a specific skill set, it no longer tested the manual dexterity and mastery of the brush, pencil, or pen.

Many now argue that the historic veracity of photography has been brought into focus by digital imaging because "digital imaging is revolutionizing the way we think about photography." (3) Yet silver-based photography has always had its manufactured images, its abstract images, its "doctored" images and distortions of the external world. The introduction of digital technology into the imaging field and, in particular, computer-based seamless montage technique has merely called the veracity of photographic images into question by a larger audience. Manipulation has been part of photography since the earliest times. Allegorical and propaganda pictures were created that did not represent a real world. The reason that manipulated photographs and unmanipulated photographs have coexisted since the beginning of photography without raising more explicit questions as to the difference may lie within the paradox that unmanipulated photographs derived a higher level of veracity from manipulated photographs.

WHERE DOES THE VERACITY LIE?

The veracity of photography was present from the disclosure of the various techniques that became modern photography. To some extent, the veracity predated the introduction of photography because veracity is a characteristic of the image created by the camera obscura. The level of veracity bestowed upon the camera obscura image (appropriately applied) was transferred to the photographic image (inappropriately applied--for no lesser reason than the resultant photographic image, unlike the camera obscura image, was monochromatic and textured by the surface coating).

Some commentators suggest that photography inherited its veracity from the Physionotrace, where a subject sat in the device and had their profile traced onto a copper plate from which multiple copies could be printed. The emerging middle class, who mostly subscribed to this method, believed that the images thus produced "a mechanically transcribed truth." (4) However, Silvia Kolbowski places the verisimilitude of the photograph upon an early photographic experiment in which Niepce reproduced an image by means of contact printing an oiled engraving onto a light sensitive emulsion. (5) Mary Warner Marien suggests that postmortem photographs, part of the Victorian mourning ritual, were partly responsible for people's belief in photography's high veracity--mostly over painting and memory. (6) Jennifer Green-Lewis places the beginning of the rise in photography's veracity in that same time Roger Fenton was sent to photograph the Crimean War (1854-56). Yet Fenton's photographs show the battlefield after the bodies were cleared away and, therefore, are not accurate pictures of some of the truths of the event. She says, "Fenton's pictures unambiguously contradicted the newspapers of the day and the later history books." (7) Green-Lewis says the photographs outweighed the written reports in the beliefs of the readers of the day because "they were perceived as independent and unmediated facts," (8) whereas the written reports had the bias of the author attached. Yet, the rise in popularity of stereographic photographs during the late 1850s and 1860s contributed to the perceived high veracity of photographs by adding a three-dimensional illusion of depth (9) when carried over into single view, black-and-white photographs. Kolbowski says the verisimilitude of photography "is still loudly proclaimed in the mass media and many areas of the academy." (10)

Martha Rosler points out that many early landscape photographs were double-exposed or double-printed to render clouds in the sky because the orthochromatic emulsions of the era were incapable of achieving results where clouds and landscape were both correctly exposed at once. She says that veracity posed no problems for the photographer or viewer because the manipulations "were in the service of a truer truth, one closer to conceptual adequacy" (11) This statement presents a contradiction for veracity's true meaning; on one hand, the veracity is determined by the viewer, while on the other hand, veracity is presented in manipulated images. In supporting the high veracity of photography, Lancet (1859) suggested that "[p]hotography is so essentially the Art of Truth--and the representative Truth in Art--that it would seem to be the essential means of reproducing all forms and structures of which science seeks for delineation." (12)

Paul Burrows suggests it is the camera operator, the photographer, who is the untruthful one, more so than the photograph. "The camera lies" (13) because the photographer is in control of the treatment of subject matter in the picture. He says this extends to the picture editor, caption writer, or others in the chain when the photograph is used in a publication. Yet while the photographer is the first responsible influence on a photograph apart from the subject (who may be unaware of being photographed) and usually must bear the brunt of accusation, it is not the photographer who gives photographs their veracity--not directly. Daguerre, Niepce, and Talbot believed that photographs were the product of nature, not of an operator. (14) Elizabeth Ermarth (15) and Green-Lewis identify the creator "of the realist photograph (the documentary picture, the medical record, the mug shot) ..." (16) as a non-person, or at best a collective anonymous author wherein they are perceived to have minimal influence over the way the subject is shown. But the camera itself is a tool, an inanimate object incapable of taking a photograph by itself without human intervention.

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THE PHOTOGRAPHIC PROCESS

At a time when the human eye was thought to be an accurate, reliable, and uninterpretive instrument for viewing the external world, the camera obscura was thought to be the equivalent of the human eye--the "retine physique" (17) or physical eye, and therefore incapable of distorting reality. Of those camera obscuras fitted with a lens, some produced dark and vignetted images with muted hues. Just as with modern photography, the equipment determined the quality of the image. The idea of high veracity came to photography from the camera obscura even though the first fixed images hardly resembled the image as viewed by the camera obscura, or that of the scene in the real world.