This Photo Is Lying to You

Link via Outside Online

PHOTOGRAPHER ED FREEMAN is working on a book about surfing, though he’s never surfed a day in his life. A couple of years ago, while shooting stock in Hawaii, he stumbled upon some surfers on the North Shore of Oahu. He was blown away by the “athleticism, the intimate relationship with nature, and the inherent danger of it all,” he says. “I knew I wanted to do something that was art, not sports photography. I wanted the pictures to be about how surfing feels to me. Not how it is.”

Freeman readily admits the images he created were “Photoshopped halfway to death.” He spent hours on his computer, crafting the skies, combining different pictures of waves, and in one instance stitching together a Frankensurfer out of multiple riders. Two of the finished products won awards in an annual contest judged by Photo District News, a leading professional-photography publication.

…One of the earliest milestones in our current digital age of manipulation occurred in 1994, four years after the introduction of Adobe Photoshop, when a rising wildlife photographer named Art Wolfe published Migrations, in which a third of the images were photo illustrations. An early adopter of digital tools, Wolfe added elephants and zebras to photos and turned the heads of birds to fit his perfectionist notion of natural patterns. In the introduction, he stated that it was an art book and that he had enhanced images “as a painter would on a canvas,” but Migrations still started a stampede of accusations.

Celebrated outdoor photographers Frans Lanting and the late Galen Rowell criticized the book, with Rowell warning of the changes set into motion once the trust is broken between nature photographers and viewers.

Which brings us to our current crisis. Wolfe told me that if Migrations were published in 2009, nobody would bat an eye. “In today’s natural-history world, the idea of removing a telephone pole or lightening a shadow or removing a distracting out-of-focus branch is acceptable,” he says. Only “purists” would complain, and he “can’t even have a dialogue with them.”