I have no view on (and little interest in) what may or may not be happening with the British royals. But it’s an odd thing to see so many people continuing to engage photography in terms of accuracy versus artifice.
As a historian who worked with visual materials early in my career, namely advertisements, I understood something of how photographs or photorealistic art hoped to be seen by viewers as being “real to life” in a way that cartoons or other forms of visual representation were not. And along with that, pretty much any historian who looks at photographs understands that what gets inside a frame and what lies outside of it is a very conscious choice on the part of the person holding the camera, and that even images which present themselves as spontaneous or accidental might be very much otherwise.
But I didn’t really understand all the other ways you could amplify, recast, and alter photographic images until I started making digital photographs and processing them. Suddenly “dodging” and “burning” as concepts in analog photography meant something more tangible to me, and I began to get a keener understanding of how gifted Photoshop users were making some of the funny—and sometimes deceptive—forms of collage and alteration that they were known for. It was a stunning revelation to me the first time I combined a series of macro images of a single flower taken at different focal depths to get a final product where the whole thing was in focus. So that’s how that happens, I realized—up to that point I’d taken macro shots and wondered how on earth those images where everything was sharp were made.
I really like some styles of collaging and layering, and if I have any aesthetic goals in the near-term future, it would be to try my hand at some of that kind of work. But I don’t have much interest in the sort of thing where I’m touching up a portrait except for some of the basics—taking out a blemish, fixing red-eye, taking down the clarity a notch to soften skin, and so on. But that’s the point, too—there isn’t a “true” image and a “fake” one. Even the false color in various astronomical photographs of stars, planets and so on had a true purpose—in many cases, in order to bring out features that the human eye would have trouble seeing otherwise.
I did once try my hand at putting two moments in time together, but I couldn’t make myself fully commit to making them seem real in the same frame.
But it did make me realize that you could make some beguiling combinations that called attention to their own artifice while also still having some sense of reference to a real frozen moment in time—after all, the two images were only seconds apart, cause and effect right alongside each other. It’s just that putting them together in a serious way meant something different—it meant watching a man do something insane and probably burn himself badly—rather than watching a man celebrate the New Year. I suppose more than anything else that’s why the photos of the royals are now so scrutinized: with obvious alteration of what is plainly meant to look normal, they mean something other than what they set out to mean.