Photo manipulation

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original
People removed in the background and gentle retouching on the face

Under a photo manipulation refers to the alteration or manipulation of a photograph with the help of technical means to pretend to a strange state of affairs.

The manipulation can take place before, during or after the recording.

history

The history of photo manipulation has always been closely linked to that of photography itself. As early as the 19th century, when it became technically possible to fix images chemically , photographers tried to change photos using technical or compositional tricks. Her goal was to create a picture of a reality that did not exist as it was. Various means were used.

The French Hippolyte Bayard (1801–1887) is one of the earliest photographers and even developed his “camera” before Louis Daguerre . He started his first photographic experiments in February 1839. The process that Bayard invented in the course of these experiments in March 1839 was called the " direct positive process ". He had thus developed a method to bring the images directly onto paper as positive. However, a friend of Daguerre's, François Arago , persuaded him to wait a year before publishing his work - so Daguerre published his invention first, which is why Bayard is not considered the inventor of photography.

Bayard then took a self-portrait depicting himself as drowned, a protest against this injustice. It symbolizes that he had to remain silent about his invention. He is named as the inventor of the modern technology of combination printing because he already used different negatives, which he combined into one image.

Political abuse

Those in power like to capitalize on the fact that the average viewer tends to overestimate the credibility of photos. The use of photo manipulation for political purposes is particularly easy when the media are under personal control. Such abuse has taken place and continues to take place in all societies in which individual interests can be used against the community.

  • Stalin had the Hungarian revolutionary Tibor Szamuely retouched from a picture in which he stood behind Lenin. It should no longer be associated with the Bolshevik revolution . Famous victims of Soviet censorship were Trotsky and Kamenev , who were considered opponents of the regime in later times. See in detail: Grigori Petrowitsch Goldstein
  • Mao's wife was removed from various photos after his death. The following regime wanted to prevent the cult of Mao from being associated with his wife's political association.
  • Hitler had Goebbels retouched from some pictures in which both of them could be seen with Leni Riefenstahl .
  • Political retouching played a role in Czechoslovakia , where aesthetic flaws were often the reason for changes. People or buildings were removed, repositioned or small blemishes repaired. Counterfeits were made by specially hired specialists, often imprisoned banknote counterfeiters.
  • Propaganda was another reason why photos were manipulated. In the First World War , changed images were intended to dramatize the situation and put the population in a war mood.
  • On the occasion of political campaigns, retouches were made that caused damage to the adversary. "Scandals" were created through manipulated photos.
  • Already at the time of the American Civil War , photographers were changing images for propaganda purposes or to increase the drama. Such photos were sold as a kind of “ souvenir ” to the highest paying people.
  • The photo of Blood Sunday in Petersburg (1925) was posed.
  • The well-known shot of the raising of the Soviet victory flag on the German Reichstag at the end of World War II at the Berlin Reichstag on May 2, 1945 is reproduced. It was only taken two days after the actual hoisting by Mikhail Petrovich Minin on the evening of April 30, 1945. The photo taken on May 2 by the front reporter Yevgeny Chaldei was also retouched several times. In the original picture, a soldier wore several, presumably stolen, wristwatches, one of which was retouched. Later some clouds of smoke were made darker and more threatening. A flag billowing in the wind was also shown in the picture.
  • Long-time Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi used his media power as the owner of Berlusconi TV to manipulate images.
  • In 2011, the Hasidic (ultra-Orthodox) newspaper “Der Tzitung” manipulated the official photo of the White House in its report on Bin Laden's killing: In the opening photo, the American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a second woman are retouched - because of religious morality , the men reading the newspaper Prohibit the sight of women.
  • In 2017, the deposed Catalan regional government published a photo of the “members of the legitimate government” on its website, on which the former minister Santi Vila i Vicente had been retouched, but had forgotten to remove his (still visible) left leg.

Methods of manipulation

Since the 1980s, the possibilities for manipulating photos have increased considerably. The development in electronic image processing made easier image manipulation possible. The software tools usually allow changes to be made that are barely noticeable to the untrained eye . Before the computer age , photographers relied on their manual retouching skills for such projects. However, their methods are recognizable as forerunners of the new techniques. Photo manipulation became a dominant part of the mass media . In addition to political reasons , beauty retouching is ubiquitous. There is (almost) no published portrait without manipulating the desired key stimuli.

Older methods

Manipulation techniques are much older than a hundred years. Using fine brushes and special paint, important image details were traced on both photos and the originals (negatives, glass plates). In most cases this work served to improve the impression of sharpness . This method was so successful that it was used by most professional photographers for such purposes by the late 20th century. A popular method that did not require a great deal of technical effort was re-enacting scenes (staged photography), which was mainly used when the photographer was not present at the time of the incident.

Another possibility, which is still used in a similar form, was photomontage , in which an image was composed of several negatives or was created by multiple exposures . Composography was a mixture of these two methods. Removing or adding details and incorrect explanations of the text cannot distort the photo itself, but the context in which the image is placed.

Composographies

The composography is a retouched picture collage . The American Harry Grogin is considered to be its inventor, as the expression was first mentioned in his magazine "The Graphic". During the trial of the Rhinelander couple (1925), the photographers were unable to take usable photos, so Art Director Grogin used photos of the people present in the courtroom and re-enacted the scene with actors. He copied the heads of the sitter on their bodies. He used a total of 20 different photos for one image that appeared in "The Graphic". The forgery was marked as such with the information that the picture was taken in the studio.

The composography had existed for a long time, as early as 1857 the photographer Oscar Gustave Rejlander was producing images of documentary quality, which he had put together from 30 separate negatives to form one image.

Newer methods

Modern digital image processing offers innumerable, easy-to-implement manipulation options. The limits of manipulation are practically only given by the imagination.

The need arose to give a photo evidence again. Attempts to realize this in a technical way are the digital negative , digital watermark or digital image forensics . However, even simple means of composition, such as the choice of the location of the picture, allow some manipulation options:

  • A hotel in the middle of a commercial area (photo taken with a telephoto lens from a great distance).
    Even with this image section, many details of the environment are no longer visible: hardware stores, furniture stores, high-voltage lines, hustle and bustle and a lot of traffic.

  • With a location closer to the building and a shorter focal length , the commercial environment is hidden
    ... and the image already makes a calmer impression.

  • Photographed from an even closer location and with a wide-angle lens , the scene almost looks like in a park.

Subjective image interpretation

In addition to objectively quantifiable photo manipulations, the individuality of the perception of a photo starts with the interpretation of it. The perception of the same image by two people can therefore lead to seriously different results. The reason for this are various bio-psychological processes. For example, the information conveyed from the retina to the primary visual cortex passes through two different processing paths: Movements in particular are perceived via the partial processing path, while the temporal processing path is used for object, color and pattern recognition. Based on this neural breakdown of image information into individual parts and the ability of the brain to associate what has been perceived with experiences that have already been made and thereby process it in a modified manner, the subjectivity of the image interpretation can already be well illustrated. Photo manipulation in the broader sense does not only take place in the production of the image creator, but also in the perception and interpretation of the recipient.

credibility

The photojournalist's work has always been based on the trust of readers and thus on the degree of credibility inherent in his pictures. In the early days of photography, it was even believed that the camera couldn't lie and therefore everything it showed was true. This trust in the realistic reproduction of the environment has been put to a tough test over the years, as the number of cases of manipulation increased. Nevertheless, photography still enjoys a certain evidential character.

The word “ manipulation ” does not originally have a negative connotation. Paul Martin Lester first defined the term in one of his articles as “ to operate, use, or handle something ”. Only the third and fourth meaning “ to control or influence somebody or something in an ingenious or devious way ” and “ to change or present something in a way that is false, but personally advantageous ” contains the bad taste that we associate with this word . It refers to the fraudulent intent behind the mere change, and it is only in this declaration that ethically incorrect behavior is defined.

So-called picture illustrations, such as those found on the front pages of magazines , fall into the category of permitted changes . They must be recognizable as falsifications or marked as such and may not claim to be original photos. Other legal practices are, for example, zooming, changing the angle, using different lenses, and various darkroom techniques such as adjusting contrast and gray levels.

On the other hand, photomontages or otherwise altered images that are output as originals are definitely not legal. They are referred to as "visual lies" and thus violate the due diligence and truthfulness of the press and are not covered by the freedom of the press. However, there is no explicit legal regulation that would prohibit photo manipulation. It is questionable whether an abstract legal regulation in this area is even possible, because the decision whether a legitimate image processing already represents an illegitimate (and thus possibly illegal) photo manipulation always has to be considered in the respective context.

A common form of identification of manipulation is the symbol "[M]" in the source information.

literature

  • Dino A. Brugioni: Photo Fakery. The history and techniques of photographic deception and manipulation. Brassey's, Dulles VA 1999, ISBN 1-57488-166-3 .
  • Oliver Deussen: Image manipulation. How computers distort our reality Spektrum Akademischer-Verlag, Berlin et al. 2007, ISBN 978-3-8274-1900-2 .
  • Rainer Fabian: Photography as a document and a forgery. Desch, Munich 1976, ISBN 3-420-04712-3 .
  • Walter Hömberg : Pictures can also lie. On the history of image manipulation . In: Say and write. Issue 7, 1995, ISSN  1431-8350 , pp. 10-11.
  • Walter Hömberg: news poet. Journalism between facts and falsification. In: Ute Nawratil, Philomen Schönhagen, Heinz Starkulla jr. (Ed.): Media and mediators of social communication. Contributions to the theory, history and criticism of journalism and journalism. Festschrift for Hans Wagner . Leipziger Universitäts-Verlag, Leipzig 2002, ISBN 3-936522-06-5 , pp. 289-306.
  • Alain Jaubert (Ed.): Photos that lie. Politics with fake pictures. Athenaeum, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-610-08523-1 .
  • David King : Stalin's retouching. Photo and art manipulation in the Soviet Union. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1997, ISBN 3-930908-33-6 .
  • Paul Lester: Photojournalism. An ethical approach. Erlbaum, Hillsdale NJ 1991, ISBN 0-8058-0671-7 .
  • Martha Rosler : Image simulations, computer manipulations: some considerations. In: Wolfgang Kemp : Theory of Photography. Volume 4: Hubertus von Amelunxen (Ed.): 1980–1995. Schirmer / Mosel, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-88814-729-8 , pp. 129–170.
  • Foundation House of the History of the Federal Republic of Germany (Ed.): Pictures that lie. = X for U. Book accompanying the exhibition of the House of History Foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany. 3. Edition. Bouvier, Bonn 2003, ISBN 3-416-02902-X .
  • Rudolf Strietholt: Forgeries, photo montages, intermediate times . In: Emil Dovifat (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Publizistik. Volume 2: Practical Journalism. 1st chapter. de Gruyter, Berlin 1969, pp. 106–155.

Web links

Wikiversity: Photo manipulation with GIMP  course materials

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ www.heise.de; Andrea Trinkwalder: When Pixels Lie: Image Optimization or Forgery ?, September 2, 2008 shows one of the examples often reproduced in school books: Lenin with Kamenev and Trotsky on Sverdlov Square in Moscow, later Kamenev and Trotsky were retouched.
  2. ↑ Milan, April 18, 2008, Piazza del Duomo, followers of Berlusconi duplicated via Photoshop on: photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com ( Memento from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ zeit.de / Jörg Lau : It's a man's world: Ultra-Orthodox newspaper lets Hilary Clinton disappear from the photo
  4. ↑ El País (Madrid): El Govern destituido borra a Santi Vila en su nueva web . 19th November 2017
  5. ^ A b Jan-Philipp Stein, Sana Sehic, Markus Appel: Powerful images and image manipulations . In: Markus Appel (ed.): The psychology of the post-factual: About fake news, "Lügenpresse", Clickbait & Co. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg 2020, ISBN 978-3-662-58695-2 , p. 177-187 , doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-662-58695-2_16 .
  6. ^ Karl R. Gegenfurtner, Sebastian Walter, Doris I. Braun: Visual information processing in the brain . In: HD Huber, B. Lockermann, M. Scheibel (Eds.): Image / Media / Knowledge. Visual competence in the media age . Kopaed, Munich, p. 69-88 .
  7. ↑ P. Weber, M. Pache, HJ Kaiser, J. Lütschg: Development and developmental disorders of central visual perception . In: Monthly Pediatrics . tape 150 , no. 1 , January 1, 2002, ISSN  0026-9298 , p. 62-69 , doi : 10.1007 / s112-002-8182-8 .
  8. ↑ Maria Jansen: Attention, [M] manipulation! (Freelens Magazin # 12, 2nd quarter 2000)