Page 195 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

PAUL MESSARIS

question the very indexicality of photography. If an image or part of an image
that looks like a photograph can now be created by non-photographic means,
the notion that a photograph is a direct record of visual reality is no longer a
defining principle of the medium as a whole. Critics of potentially deceptive
digital imaging are usually concerned about its consequences for the viewer
who has not detected the presence of digital manipulation and may, indeed, be
more generally unaware of the ubiquity of digitally manipulated imagery.
However, a different, somewhat contrasting school of criticism focuses on how
photography’s loss of indexicality affects those viewers who are, in fact, aware
and may even be practitioners of digital imaging in their own right. Such
viewers, it is argued, will eventually lose all faith in the photographic medium,
and photography will no longer be accorded its privileged place among media
with a stake in appearing faithful to fact (Ritchin 1990).
This possibility is demonstrated very vividly in a story told by the distin-
guished landscape and nature photographer Galen Rowell (Dalai Lama and
Rowell 1990). While taking photographs of the palace of the Dalai Lama in
Tibet, Rowell noticed a gorgeous rainbow in the sky. He also realized that
from a different vantage point – a great distance away – the rainbow would
appear to terminate on the palace itself. Anxious to get this more dramatic
view before the rainbow disappeared, Rowell set off in a great hurry over
difficult terrain. He arrived at the spot exhausted, but the rainbow was still
there, and his efforts were rewarded with a spectacular photograph. However,
when he showed the photograph to audiences in the United States, he found
that, instead of admiring his compositional skills and the sheer physical effort
required to produce this picture, viewers who were unaware of the circum-
stances surrounding its creation were inclined to assume that the photograph
was simply the product of digital manipulation, a routine case of superimposing
one image on top of another.
The assumption that increasing awareness of potentially misleading photo-
graphic practices may result in a growing public distrust of the medium is
supported by the outcome of a study by Slattery and Tiedge (1992), who found
that labeling portions of a newscast as ‘staged recreations’ led to a more general
erosion of faith even in those segments that were not so labeled. As people
become more familiar with digital imaging practices and as abuses of photo-
graphy’s documentary qualities receive increasing attention from media watch-
dogs, it may well turn out that photographic images will lose some of their
traditional aura of being true-to-life. Still, such predictions should be tempered
by a recognition that the public’s faith in photographic truth may never have
been as blind as some media critics have assumed. The manipulation of photo-
graphic reality has a history that is essentially as long as that of photography
itself, and there is good evidence that, even in the earliest years of the medium,
its potentially misleading nature had not escaped public notice. There is also
good reason to believe that ordinary viewers are perfectly capable of challeng-
ing photographic evidence when it doesn’t fit their own preconceptions – as

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