Included in this week’s readings for the
Social Role of the Mass Media class was a piece called “Detecting the Truth in
Photos,” which detailed the ever increasing ease with which one can manipulate
photos. Not only is Photoshop and its ilk
widely available and periodically updated, providing more opportunity for image
manipulation, but the rapid nature of social media posting makes the spread of
such images more rampant and, I would say, so frequent that only the most
dedicated among us has time to do the legwork to investigate whether an image
has been altered.
And as a dedicated journalism teacher, I
looked down on Photoshop use, even by my best friend Paul, who likes to add
filters and effects to photos using the program.
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Chicago, Illinois. Looking northeast from the Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower).
Photographed by Stephen Milligan (June 14, 2012). |
I looked down on Photoshop, that is, until
the summer of 2012.
That summer I found myself on an
architectural pilgrimage to the Midwest to visit and photograph as many Frank
Lloyd Wright properties as I could in Wisconsin. The icing on the cake was the fact that the
Wright Plus housewalk in Wright’s Oak Park, Illinois, neighborhood coincided
with the first leg of my trip, so, of course, I took advantage of this opportunity!
Now, you may be wondering what this has to
do with Photoshop.
When I returned to South Carolina and began
pulling the photos off of the memory card to categorize and edit them, I was
horrified to see an indistinct gray blob in the top left corner of the last
several sets of photos. Somehow, at the
end of the Wisconsin portion of my trip and all the way through my second stop
in Chicago (and, yes, there would have been a third stop in Chicago if there
had been any way possible), some dust or debris had found its way into the
camera and lodged itself on the lens, creating this blob on each photo. And since I couldn’t see it in the
viewfinder, I never even knew it was there.
My immediate concern was getting the camera
repaired before I took any other photos. Unfortunately, there’s a dearth of camera
stores these days, especially around here, so the best and closest one I could
find was Biggs Camera in Charlotte, North Carolina, about an hour north of
me. This was in no way a hardship,
though, because of the Cheesecake Factory in SouthPark Mall, just minutes from
the camera store!
Of course, my next concern was what to do
about the spot in the photos. In some
photos, the blob was indistinguishable, obscured by trees or dark colors or
patterns, but all shots with sky or light colors at the top left were ruined. Creative cropping only helped in a few
cases. I certainly couldn’t go back and
recreate my trip (although I would have loved to), and I certainly couldn’t
discard all of those photos of Frank Lloyd Wright properties, a few county
courthouses, and that stunning Chicago skyline.
So I broke down and bought Photoshop.
I can’t say I did it all perfectly, but I
managed to get rid of that gray blob in each photo. Was I manipulating reality? Not really, I suppose, because the blob
really wasn’t in the sky or on the building or floating above a daylily
blossom. And keep in mind, these photos
were not being used to illustrate news—I justify this to myself by thinking of
these as artistic photos rather than journalistic photos.
“Detecting the Truth in Photos” tells us the
latest versions of Photoshop are so advanced that some changes are practically undetectable.
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