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Photo Manipulation Critique
Critique
After reading the two articles, I certainly have more intense views on photo manipulation in the media. I already knew that there was photo manipulation in magazines and almost every other form of media today, but I didn’t know that it existed in history. It was interesting to look at the Abraham Lincoln picture and the Kent State University picture in the “Photo Tampering Throughout History” article. I didn’t know photographs were being manipulated by world leaders to show that they no longer have connections with certain people.
There certainly is a problem with photo manipulation in media. It could be used to sell images that are not necessary to young adults, outlined in “The Illusionists” article, but it can also hurt people’s images as well. The photo of Sarah Palin holding a gun half-naked can definitely hurt Palin’s image and her popularity. Invoking emotions of viewers with photographs are fine, but I don’t think it’s the right thing to do manipulate photos to invoke a certain emotion. It seems like manipulating not just images, but also people’s emotions. There is also a problem of an identity loss. Photoshopping a person’s head on a body that isn’t his/her own forces him to lose his identity. That picture is no loner a picture of that person, but a whole new individual; someone who doesn’t even exist.
What we can do to possibly combat this problem is to hire more people to check these photos that appear in magazines. We need more people like Professor Hany Farid, who decides whether photos are fake or not. The more people we have in this industry, the more “innocent” photos get, and it also allows for the technology to tell fakes and reals apart to advance and be up-to-date with the advances of photoshopping.
However, I highly doubt that we can do anything more to help this problem. Airbrushing and manipulation has been in the works since the 1800s, and nothing has changes two centuries later. We are still doing the same altering of images, and even further now with computer generated images enhancing hairs in shampoo commercials and skin on babies. Those who spend their lives altering images will always find a way to get around the experts who spot the mistakes. They will learn, and they will improve with photo manipulation as technology advances. There is also the “disclaimer” method, where in a small caption, they actually say that the photo is digitally altered, except it’s so small that no one notices.
But most of all, we viewers ourselves are getting so used to digitally altered images that we can’t tell apart the real and fake unless it is so drastic. Our eyes are now so used to the idealistic and fake hair in the shampoo commercials, that even if we see them on the television, we don’t see anything wrong with it. Perhaps, even if technology advances enough that we can easily tell apart fake images and real ones, our eyes will be too manipulated already that we will not notice anything anymore, no matter how fake. By then maybe the news agency won’t even care about “faith”, because our brains will be also be manipulated so that we will basically anything.
Photo Manipulation
I made two collages from my photo essay, and I didn’t know which to choose, so I decided to post both:
Collage 1:
Collage on Elm Street
For this collage, I decided to use the stores in the Elm Street photo I took, and in each big, open window, I put the rest of the pictures in the photo essay. I applied some photo filters to make the pictures match the stores’ lights, and I also cropped the picture to make it an almost panoramic picture.
Collage 2:
iPad Home Screen
My second collage involved taking the iPad home screen (since I went to the Apple Store) and replacing seven of the icons with scenes from my photo essay. The supposed name for the icon for each picture is now a caption for the picture.
Visible Knowledge 