Just say yes...

[Giedo]

Alain,

Thank you for your insight!
I've struggled with this issue for long and tried a lot of diferent approaches. At one point I got so frustrated of explaining (and the lack of result of this approach as you clarified) that I tried a simple 'NO' for an answer: a straight lie! This helped me too, as people don't expect an answer like that and don't dare to question your integrity. ;-)

But I like your approach much better and will certainly adopt it.

Thanks again!
Giedo

[seany]

Alain,I'm not surprised you've had a problem with people asking "if you manipulated you photos" quite honestly it has taken you a long time to learn what most people learn at an early age i.e. trying to justify one's actions to those who are trying to put one down is a waste of time.
Having read most of your articles here at LL while finding the articles interesting and in some cases informative they do on the whole suffer from long windedness and tend to belabour the point somewhat. So yes I think you are correct in saying "yes or no " and my advice would be to say it more often in your articles and conversations with people.
P.S. I like the way you manipulate your images.

[Rob C]

Alain, for crissakes hire an editor!

Rob C

[katemann]

There is simply no reason to engage in a discussion with people who have an agenda to put themselves in a superior light with respect to you. Ever.

Do I manipulate my photographs? Of course - the very act of taking a photograph is a manipulation of reality. Cameras simply don't record reality absolutely. The entire argument is a waste of time.

Do I feel the need to persuade others to my point of view? Nope. Don't have time. Too many photographs to take, too much annoying stuff to get done and out of the way.

Don't want to buy my photographs? Fine then. Don't like me? Fine, goodbye.

Another good column Alain. thanks.

[alainbriot]

At one point I got so frustrated of explaining that I tried a simple 'NO' for an answer: a straight lie!

But I like your approach much better and will certainly adopt it.
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Good decision ;-)  The power of the response I recommend lies in the fact that you are speaking the truth.

[howiesmith]

Do I manipulate my photographs? Of course - the very act of taking a photograph is a manipulation of reality. Cameras simply don't record reality absolutely. The entire argument is a waste of time.

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Ask the questioner what they mean by manipulation.  Then try to answer, or not.  A simple yes or no may be sufficient.

[nigeldh]

Well, most film prints were manipulated so why shouldn't we do the same for digital negatives?

Remember when we would burn and dodge prints to lighten and darken areas. Remember adjusting the color filters for prints to make the blue negatives taken in tungsten light look more normal. Or the urban legends about the white dog dyed green for St. Patrick's Day where the lab spent hours making the dog white again?

What about the choice of films to decide if an image should have the look of Fujichrome, Kodachrome, or Ektachrome. Grab a demo copy of Alien Skin's Exposure and see how your image would have looked back in the days of film depending upon which film stock you used and how it was processed.

Print the same print on different papers. See how the creamy look of a Fine Art Paper with no OBA, optical brightening agents, is different from the same print on a similar white paper with OBA, and is different from the same print on a glossy RC paper.

Use a demo copy of AKVIS's Sketch or Fo2PiX's ArtMasterPro and see how an image can be manipulated to produce a completely different look.

Folks who work with remote sensing, or image analysis, know that an image is really a raw product and it is the post processing that brings out, distorts, or hides the information in that raw image. With digital, it is just easier to manipulate that raw information into a final image.

[wolfnowl]

Alain:  Thanks for your most recent article.  Clear, concise and to the point.  Did I like it?

Yes.

Mike.

[TimothyFarrar]

Alain,

Thanks for the in-depth thinking behind "Just Say Yes". Since the first article in the series, I have been looking forward to each new edition.

While I think you have covered the topic of the buyer/browser quite well, I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on handling the gallery or art show judy with regards to the typical question of being placed in a "color photography" vs "digital and manipulation" catagory.

Typically the rules say work created by "non-silver" techniques must be place in the "digital and manipulation" catagory. If you follow letter of the rules, anyone who simply drum scans a 4x5 for printing on a large format inkjet or lightjet has produced a work created by a non-silver technique, regardless if the development is nearly the same as what would have been done in a "chemical" darkroom.

Yet, it seems as if the "color photography" catagory is more fitting to the landscape photographer such as yourself who simply developes the photo using digital tools.

Do you follow the rules and go along with the mis-interpretation that simply using a digital process will somehow yield a more "manipulated" result than someone doing contrast masking, dodging and burning in a chemical darkroom?

Or you do classify yourself in the catagory of which your end result, the final print fits?

Should not the term "manipulated" be reserved for extremes like the moving pyramids of that National Geographic cover in 1982, or placing the face of a man on a woman's body?

[alainbriot]

Hi Timothy,

I don't categorize myself, besides saying that I create landscape photographs.  I'm not big on juried shows, or competitions. Regarding galleries, I am not in favor of labelling the work beyond the subject matter, or, preferably, the name of the artist/author, be it in shows of my work or of other photographers' work.  

Photography needs to "grow up" in that sense. Painting, for example, is way further in that respect. The Louvre doesn't organize its painting galleries on the basis of medium, neither does the museum of Modern Art in Paris, or other major art museums.  Rather, they organize their galleries on the basis of style or period.  

Photography, while a much younger medium, has enough of a body of work already to use the same approach.  The real issue is stepping back from looking at technique so much and starting to look at art in an equal amount.  I may address all this in a future essay, but the fact is that the whole series "Reflections on Photography and Art" is about this need for change.  This is why I started the series with "Art & Science".

Regarding manipulation, I am comfortable with the term. Personally, I prefer the term "enhancement" but if people say "manipulation" I won't correct them. The terminology is not all that important.  What truly matters is being comfortable with the approach we use.

[dturina]

The concept of image alteration seems to be very popular among those who couldn't make a good photo to save their life. When they see something they know they couldn't possibly create, they usually say "it's all photoshop". Yeah right. The worst of all is, not only they can't take pictures, they're lousy at detecting real photoshop alterations; you could rework most of the picture and they wouldn't notice it, but if you shoot a sunset with 30s exposure to smooth the waves into a mist, and use a nd4 grad to cover the sky and bring out the shadows, scan the slide with straight settings and just print it, they are bound to scream "photoshop" and nothing you can say will convince them, so there's no point in trying. They don't need to be convinced, they need a brain transplant.

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

Good essay (as usual), Alain.

It is too bad that photography hasn't "grown up" enough to put this issue behind it, at least in the public's eye. I suspect that serious amateurs, like myself, have an easier time dealing with this issue than do many pros. Since I don't have to sell my photographs to survive, I am free to ignore juried shows that insist on classifying images and clients who want me to meet their strict criteria. I, too, am proud of what I bring to the images I display.

I wonder how Jerry Uelsmann responds to questions like "Do you manipulate?"

Anyway, to the question, I say "Yes!"

And to the essay, I say "Yes!"

Eric

[alainbriot]

I wonder how Jerry Uelsmann responds to questions like "Do you manipulate?"
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Salvador Dali, who like Jerry Uelsmann was a Surrealist, said that:

One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.

Surrealism is, in part, the representaion of dreams or of a dream-like state.

[Gordon Buck]

Thanks, Alain, you always get us to thinking -- and commenting!

It is somewhat amusing that, to many people, an increase in color saturation produces a "manipulated" print whereas a decrease produces a classic black/white print.

[alainbriot]

It is somewhat amusing that, to many people, an increase in color saturation produces a "manipulated" print whereas a decrease produces a classic black/white print.
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Yes, I agree although in my view this also addresses a different issue that I plan to write about later in the series.  However, eventually it is important, in my view, to move away from concerns for the terminology.  What matters is being comfortable with the approach we choose to use, which in my case is to modify, in various ways, the image coming out of the camera.  

Different people will call this approach different things and that's OK with me.  What is important is that they understand that I "modified" or "changed" the image.  That what they are looking at, in the final print or master file, is not the image I started with, not the image that came out of the camera.

What also matters is that this is a radically different approach to that of other photographers who prefer to not modify the image coming out of the camera.

[John Camp]

I don't disagree with any of the above, but will say that there seems to be a kind of undefinable difference between "manipulating" a photograph to make it look more like the actual on-the-ground experience, and manipulating it to make it more salable...although that might be as much a matter of taste as anything.

If you took a photo of a ranch home in a valley with winter snow around it, and sharpened it, eliminated dust spots, cloned out a little piece of phone wire in the upper left corner, burned here and dodged there, and even converted it to black and white, etc., I wouldn't be bothered; the changes are incidental to the photograph and the experience. If you put the glow of home fires in the window, amped up the sunlight so that it cast glowing orange tints across the snow, etc, stuck a couple of sea gulls up in the sky, and essentially turned it into a Thomas Kinkade scene...then I'd have more of a problem. And as a collector, if I saw a photo like the Kinkade version, I might ask if it were manipulated -- that is, if it's a presentation of something that never was, and perhaps never could be. And if it was that, I wouldn't buy it.

JC

[alainbriot]

... there seems to be a kind of undefinable difference between "manipulating" a photograph to make it look more like the actual on-the-ground experience, and manipulating it to make it more salable...
JC
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Good point but I am not talking about making an image more sellable.  I am talking about  making my photographs express my memories of the scene.  Personally, I don't place a limit on what I can do, to make sure I have complete freedom to express what I want to express.

I am aware that the approach I recommend ("yes" or "no") is a "black and white" so to speak, approach to this issue.  However, as I explain in my essay, attempts at providing "shades of grey" answers to people who ask whether I manipulate my images or not have proved to be ineffective.

[howiesmith]

Good point but I am not talking about making an image more sellable.  I am talking about  making my photographs express my memories of the scene.
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I have found it very difficult (or impossible) to solve a problem or answer a question until I know what the problem is or what the question is.  I still think the easiest way to answer "Is it manipulated?" is to simply ask "What do you mean by manipulated?"  Now you know the question and perhaps have a better chance to intelligently answer the question than by giving a simple yes or no (which may be a correct or incorrect answer to the intended question).  There is no need to assume what the question is.

[alainbriot]

I have found it very difficult (or impossible) to solve a problem or answer a question until I know what the problem is or what the question is.  I still think the easiest way to answer "Is it manipulated?" is to simply ask "What do you mean by manipulated?"  Now you know the question and perhaps have a better chance to intelligently answer the question than by giving a simple yes or no (which may be a correct or incorrect answer to the intended question).  There is no need to assume what the question is.
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In my situation, I have no problem with people saying that my work is manipulated.  So, to me, the question "is this manipulated" is perfectly clear and does not require to be stated more specifically. My answer is "yes".

I must add that I tried the approach you recommend before deciding to use the one I describe in the essay.  I felt that knowing which types of manipulations my interlocutors were referring to would help.

Why do I no longer use this approach?  Because, in my case, it failed miserably.  You may, however, be more successful than I was with it.

[howiesmith]

However,  the approach you recommend is perfectly worthwhile, in particular if you feel that you need to know which types of manipulations your interlocutor is referring to.

[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=93338\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

I have no need to know "which types of manipulations [my] interlocutor is referring to," merely a desire to answer their question.  And I have no need or desire to assume that because it looks manipulated to a viewer, that it is or isn't.  "[l]ooks" manipulated may be yes or no.

To a person who has never seen snow, all that white stuff may look manipulated.  Same with a green tree to an Eskimo.  So, "Yes, it is manipulated" might be very misleading.

But then, to the photographer, maybe educating isn't important, or misleading is important, or perhaps the photographer really doesn't care one way or the other.  I guess in that last case, either yes or no would be suffiecient..