[Leica] Best known photo ?

[pklein at 2alpha.net (Peter Klein)]

Phong and Tina:  I think you are *both* right.  And it's a very complex 
subject.

On one hand, I think most people believe that if a tool exists, it will be 
used.  If something is relatively easy, it will be done.  So indirectly, 
every artistic Photoshop manipulation adds to the background sense of 
"everybody does it." This makes it easier for people to believe only what 
they want to.  I don't think anyone believes intellectually that "pictures 
don't lie" anymore.

On the other hand, images have a way of bypassing the critical 
facility.  They get into our brains and guts in a way that words can't.  My 
directing teacher in college used to tell us that "an audience hears with 
its eyes."  In othe words, if the dialog says one thing and the  visuals 
say another, the audience will believe the visuals.

Right now, I think most people in Western societies believe that news 
photos are usually truthful, that content-changing alteration is done only 
occasionally, and the profession usually polices itself 
successfully.  Altered photos are mostly the territory of the Politburo, 
McCarthy & Co., supermarket tabloids, divorce lawyers and the occasional 
corrupt D.A.   But given the expanding political and religious 
fundamentalism afoot, how long will it be before the *possibility* of 
manipulation is turned into the *certainty* of manipulation when a photo 
contradicts someone's world view?

How all this plays out is going to be very interesting.  I'd hate to be 
prohibited from dust spotting my photos lest I corrupt the "truth checksum" 
embedded in my TIFF file by my camera or scanner.  And what of gray areas 
like the environmental portrait that appears in a newspaper or news 
magazine.  Many times these are staged in order to characterize the 
subject.  Unless the staging is obvious, it has much of the power of a 
journalistic photo, yet its honesty depends on the honesty of the photographer.

Aside:  With all this in mind, I must confess that the following photo of 
Mark Rabiner, which I posted recently, was a recreation.  But it was a 
faithful recreation of a gesture that occurred only a seconds earlier, when 
I hadn't quite focused the damn camera.  And it wasn't exactly Iwo Jima.
:-)
http://www2.2alpha.com/~pklein/temp/30RabsSkinny.htm

There.  I feel better now.

--Peter

At 12:09 PM 5/12/04 -0700, Phong wrote:
>At 09:25 AM 5/12/2004 -0400, you wrote:
>
> >Well said Henning.
> >I am staunchly on your side and Philippe's,
> >and opposite of B.D., Mark, and others'.
> >To say that the image in itself looses its power
> >because it is staged, (which it is not) is like
> >saying a story is not good because it is fiction.
> >Do you guys only watch movies "based on a true
> >story" ?
Tina wrote:

>But, Phong, to write fiction and pass it off as true would be just as wrong
>as staging a documentary photograph.  That's how several journalists have
>gotten in trouble lately.  There should be a definite line between truth
>and fiction in writing just as there should be between staged and
>documentary photographs.
>
>Tina