Photographs: whence veracity?

The ability of daguerreotypes to show "extraordinary resolution of detail, continuous tonal recording, and [optical] perspective" (18) was a reason cited for the invention's popularity as a scientific tool. But daguerreotypes are small and difficult to view because they must be held at the correct angle to the illumination source. (19) Likewise, they are monochromatic and present an image that is laterally reversed. Talbot's paper negative/positive process obtained lower resolution but the resultant prints were larger and easier to view. At the time of its introduction, photography was "celebrated for its putative ability to produce accurate images of what was in front of its lens." (20) This was largely because "images were seen as being mechanically produced, and thus free of the selective discrimination of the human eye and hand." (21) Yet scenes in photographs are rendered in such a manner as to show the external world in a way different from how it is viewed. Apart from the characteristics already mentioned, any subject movement was blurred because the early daguerreotypes needed up to a 30-minute exposure. Marien writes, "For many people in the nineteenth century, the photograph alloyed a mirror's fine detail with a window's view of the world," (22) and Green-Lewis points out that "the discourse that shaped the early understanding of photography's relationship with truth was distinguished by an eagerness to overlook its human agency." (23)

Green-Lewis posits two misconceptions about photography's veracity: The misconception of the "lack of intrusive surface of other media ... like a pane of glass between the viewer and the world ..." (24) and, consequently, that "being invisible, photography is also assumed to be more accurate than other forms of representation." (25) The photographer is seen, under this definition, as an uninvolved innocent bystander merely using a detached machine, the picture produced by autogenesis. There are marks on a surface, just no "marks of human labour." (26)

PROCESSING THE PHOTOGRAPH

The photographic process itself is as problematic as the equipment used in the "hands-off" nature of the process that reinforced perceived levels of veracity in the early years of its development. Beyond the initial stages, for much of its history, the processing side of photography has been hidden from the photographer by multinational corporations that have controlled the developing and printing of photographs since 1888 for the amateur market. This created a mystification of the process in the mind of the general public, who remain unaware of the manipulative factors of that production. As Mary Price puts it, "the assembly line performance of operations" (27) that were once done by the photographer, once relinquished by the amateur, meant that "claims to manipulation" (28) no longer survived for the snapshot and the perception of veracity increased. If the general public had remained more aware of the manipulations possible in processing the photograph, the veracity of photographs may not be as high as it is. However, this does not take into account the knowledge possessed by professional photographers, picture editors, and others of the techniques of photographic production.

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Early photographic processes varied in their ability to produce consistent quality. On one hand there is the "grainy, soft and shadowy quality of, for example, the Hill and Adamson portraits of the mid-1840s ..." (29) compared with the "crisp, detailed appearance" of the work of Edouard-Denis Baldus of 1851. (30) The calotypes of Louis De Clercq from the mid-1850s are soft with a narrow tonal range. Talbot's first images were not very sharp because his table salt and nitrate of silver coating penetrated his paper's fibers. (31) The albumen prints from Gustave Le Gray's glass negatives from the 1860s are sharp, full of fine detail with a wide tonal range. It is difficult to distinguish them from photographs taken a hundred years later with modern materials. While soft, grainy photographs would hardly lead a viewer to say such an image resembles the external world, the sharp, finely detailed images might. Except they are monochrome and do not resemble, in that regard, the colored external world, and might show detail more sharply than the human eye can resolve. So how a conclusion that photography should have a high veracity came about at the beginning of photography is difficult to fathom using these criteria.

THE PHOTOGRAPHIC CONCEPT GENERALLY

Max Kozloff (32) suggests that photographs partly receive their high veracity because people believe they affirm the external world. But as John Berger says, "The relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled." (33) Many of the comparisons that gave rise to photography's veracity were with painting or human memory, (34) not comparisons with the external world. Yet in the nineteenth century, photography did not have the high veracity it gathered to itself in the twentieth century. Susan Sontag claims that "the consequences of lying" (35) are greater for photographs than for paintings because a fake painting falsifies the history of art whereas a fake photograph falsifies reality. Green-Lewis says of photography: "Doubts concerning its limitations, however, were largely outweighed by enthusiasm for its possibilities, and the camera was far more widely regarded as an instrument of revelation than of deceit." (36) Revelation, however, does not imply truth; it merely reveals detail.

Many photographers make photomontages or staged tableaux in attempts to create a more desirable image than is possible simply by pointing a camera at the external world. In this regard they are aware that photography has a veracity that can be exploited to convince the viewer that their created scene is more truthful than a similar scene created by painting. John Tagg suggests that, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the increasing use of photographs by medical, legal, and government instrumentalities helped establish a truth in photography alongside the veracity it derived from its hands-off mechanical nature. (37) Photography provided a "metaphorical substance" (38) to a truthful relationship of reality and provided confirmation of what reality ought to be. "The camera had by the [1890s] become a means of establishing identity as well as verifying authenticity...." (39) Particularly pertinent, says Tagg, is the use of photographs by British police. Of two written guides for police photographers from which Tagg quotes, he says police were "unshaken in their belief in the photograph as a direct transcription of the real." (40) He suggests that the police photographers who wrote the guidebooks see falsifications such as cropping, retouching, or any interference with the negative as "perversions of this purity of nature." (41) William Ivins says that for people "the nineteenth century began by believing that what was reasonable was true and it wound up by believing that what it saw a photograph of was true." (42)

At most, it might be said that photography shows the shape and forms of objects more correctly than other means of three-dimensional representation. In a report to the United States Secretary of the Interior in 1875, Dr. Ferdinand V. Hayden, an expedition leader criticizing poor quality illustrations of topographic features made twenty years earlier, says, "The truthful representations of photography render such careless work so apparent that it would not be tolerated at the present day." (43) The illustrations Hayden was referring to showed mountains "with angles of sixty degrees inclination, covered with great glaciers and modelled upon the type of any other than ..." those they purported to represent. Retrospectively, it is most obvious that some of the belief in photography's veracity stems from such comparisons with poor quality illustration, and not from comparisons with the object in the external world. This should be seen as criticism of some illustrators, not necessarily verification for photography.

In 1909, George Bernard Shaw wrote along similar lines about the "terrible truthfulness of photography." (44) He was comparing a painting of a pretty girl, whom the painter calls "Juliet" after Shakespeare's character, with a photograph of a pretty girl, whom the photographer calls "Juliet." As Shaw describes it, the photograph "is still Miss Wilkins, the model. It is too true to be Juliet." (45) Like in the previous example, this is affording photography a high veracity while comparing a photograph with a painting and not with the object in the external world. This situation might indicate that the clear meaning of the perceived high veracity as it applies to photographs has changed over time. The terrible truthfulness of photographs once meant "as compared with painting" whereas more recently it has come to mean "as compared with the object in the external world." This change might have been brought about by the introduction over time of sharper images due to faster emulsions in conjunction with faster shutter speeds, truer color images, and a more sophisticated appreciation of images.

Always, the photograph's "direction has been towards the revelation of truths," (46) and this accelerated with the beginning of deliberate documentation of things and events, came to maturation with the establishment of photojournalism, and continues still. As an exercise of propaganda--brainwashing--photography's veracity has been hugely successful, but it seems not to be the product of a sentient mind, only a theme running through history, an inevitability based on a fraud.