By RICHARD B. WOODWARD
Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Through Jan. 27
New York
?Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop,? at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is assistant curator Mia Fineman?s response to a persistent question she has been asked over the past five years: Have digital technology and software programs that alter an image with a few clicks on a comkeyboard destroyed faith in the evidentiary truth of photography?
Her persuasive answer: not nearly as much as we?ve been led to believe. Supported by an astute selection of some 200 works that goes back to the painted daguerreotype and forward to darkroom alchemy from the early 1990s, she argues that photographers have been ?lying? to us since the medium?s invention, often with our encouragement.
?Faking It? surveys the techniques of perfidy?retouched or hand-colored prints, masked or ?sandwich? negatives, double exposures, reversed tones, photo-collage, lenticular distortion, air-brushing?developed by professionals and amateurs since the 1840s to accent or complicate factual realities recorded by the camera. The dual nature of photography as objective reporter and fantastic apparition offers unique dramatic options. The camera?s push-button realism makes it easier to tell convincing half-truths and outright fibs. Totalitarian governments have buttressed their own legitimacy by adding or subtracting figures in newspaper photographs, while the public in capitalist democracies has given photographers broad license to alter reality, provided their images were clearly designed as art or entertainment.
Ms. Fineman has a roomy definition of manipulated photographs. The show contains Pictorialist masterworks, such as Edward Steichen?s tinted platinum print of a moonrise in the gloaming; the anti-Fascist cut-ups of John Heartfield; Soviet, Nazi and Chinese propaganda; surrealist fashion portraits by Erwin Blumenfeld and Richard Avedon; conceptual comedy by John Baldessari and William Wegman; as well as Weegee?s political caricatures and an array of ?Tall-Tale? postcards, an American specialty that dates back to the 1910s.
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Many of these works have appeared in other books and shows, but not in a context so deliberately meant to breach well-guarded categorical preserves such as ?documentary.? The 19th-century landscape artists Gustave Le Gray and Carleton Watkins, for example, are seldom grouped with Henry Peach Robinson and Oscar Gustave Rejlander, best known for moralistic Victorian tableaus.
Ms. Fineman wonders in her essay if there is any such thing ?as an absolutely unmanipulated photograph,? and views all these men as stretchers of the truth. Robinson and Rejlander photographed costumed tableaus, while Le Gray and Watkins inserted cumulus clouds (from separate negatives) into pictures of seas or mountains. As she notes, such trumpery was not necessarily an aid to pump up the melodrama. It?s just that film at the time was insensitive to fast-moving skies. The doctored print was, in a way, a more accurate picture of the atmospheric conditions that the camera had recorded when Le Gray and Watkins had stood outdoors.
That the 19th-century public did not mind such trickery and greeted photography as a kind of stage magic can be seen in the many double-exposures here of severed heads and figures floating inside bubbles. The fraudulence of William H. Mumler, whose photographs claimed to record ?spirits? of deceased loved ones until his deceit was exposed in 1869 at a New York trial, was less common than overt forms of prevarication. The ?jackalope? and other silly graphic incongruities appeared on American postcards a decade or so before Paris intellectuals thought that pictures joining an umbrella and an ironing board constituted an art movement.
Even if people can?t decipher how an ?impossible? image is done, they can applaud stagecraft. Ms. Fineman presents for the first time prints of the two negatives that the German photographer Harry Shunk pieced together to produce ?Leap into the Void,? the iconic image from 1960 of the French artist Yves Klein swan-diving from a second-story window into the street. Other highlights that one can smile at (but need not know the mechanics of) are Grete Stern?s post-World War II ?Dream No. 1: Electrical Appliances for the Home,? in which a huge male hand reaches down to ?turn on? a lamp shaped like a curvaceous woman, a collage as funny as it is sexist; and William Mortensen?s ?Obsession,? a potent mixture of Hollywood stardom, gothic horror and 1930s kitsch.
Ms. Fineman is perhaps not as careful as she should be to separate photographs taken as personal descriptions of things or events and those constructed as illustrations for a narrative. She claims that ?straight? photography was ?always more of a rhetorical ideal than a practical reality.? As an example, her essay cites Ansel Adams?s ?Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico? from 1941, later prints of which he enhanced in the darkroom. By the standards of truth that govern photojournalism, which were never his standards, these prints were ?lies.?
But she dodges some thornier questions. Is the veracity of any image always compromised by the technology that produces it? Shouldn?t Adams receive some extra credit for capturing the scene in situ rather than by stitching the elements together with multiple negatives? Or is his artful (and sometimes excessive) use of filters as dissembling as software that lets anyone drop a full moon into any scene? If all photographs can be said to be manipulated, what is the point of this show?
?Faking It? stops before the revolution in production and dissemination of images attendant with the Internet era. But if anything, the panoply of manipulated photographs on the walls here is a match for anything done by artists since Adobe Systems Inc.
(the convenient funder of the exhibition) released Photoshop in 1990.
Don?t believe me? Step across the hall to the Met?s companion show, ?After Photoshop: Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age.? Continuity is more apparent here than historical rupture. Techniques of picture editing on a computer are more sophisticated, but the results are not.
Take the two photographs by Kelli Connell. Her 2006 digital twinning of herself in situations that suggest an erotic (or narcissistic) relationship differs hardly at all from Maurice Guibert?s c. 1890 double portrait of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec as both artist and model. Nancy Burson?s antinuclear ?Warhead I,? a computer-generated work from 1982 that anticipates what could be done in Photoshop, merges the faces of Leonid Brezhnev, Ronald Reagan, Fran?ois Mitterrand, Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher into a single head. But it is merely an updated version of Francis Galton?s composite portraits of genetic undesirables from the 1870s.
Historians of photography are continually astonished to learn in the writing and archives of the 19th century how rapidly the new technology was understood, absorbed and exploited, whether for politics, science, commerce or art. A mischievous chronicle of visual trickery over a century-and-a-half, ?Faking It? reveals the potential inherent in a communication process as transformative in its day as computers have been in ours.
Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.
A version of this article appeared October 24, 2012, on page D5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Half-Truths and Fibs.
Source: http://discovertheimpact.com/half-truths-and-fibs
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