Bits Blog: The Death of Photography Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times Fourth of July fireworks over the Hudson River in 2009.

10:07 p.m. | Updated to clarify the link to the black-and-white photograph from The Daily News of the 1986 Fourth of July celebrations.

The Fourth of July celebration this year was very different for Americans who use social media. Last year, as the fireworks burst in the air, people pulled out their smartphones and snapped still pictures. This year, they had a new tool in their life-documenting arsenal: video.

Over the last several months, a number of short video services have moved into the mainstream, including Vine, which allows people to record six-second videos, and Instagram, which introduced 15-second videos last month.

People are clearly using these services. Anyone who visited a social network stream on Thursday night would have seen endless videos of pops and sparkles in the air.

For years, photographers have been bracing for this moment, warned that the last rites will be read for photography when video technology becomes good enough for anyone to record. But as this Fourth of July showed me, I think the reports of the death of photography have been greatly exaggerated.

There are several reasons for this. First and foremost, there is the creation side, where taking a pretty still image – especially with a fancy filter — is a lot easier than creating a stunning video. Ask videographers, and they will tell you that shooting beautiful videos is really, really hard.

But the real reason photos aren’t going to be eclipsed by video is because of the way the human mind works.

“One of the things we love about the still image is the way in which it can stimulate the imagination to create a fiction around an image,” said Robin Kelsey, a professor of photography at Harvard. “The fact that we can commit a single image to memory in a way that we cannot with video is a big reason photography is still used so much today.”

Video is difficult to commit to memory. We tend to remember snapshots of a moving sequence of images, rather than the entire sequence.

Karim Nader, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, describes the way people remember things as “flashbulb memories.” He argues that “the brain’s memory system works something like a pen and notebook.”

Think about a profound moment in history: Sept. 11, 2001. The Hindenburg disaster. Barack Obama becoming the first African-American president of the United States. If you remember these events, there is a likely chance that you will recall a photo of the point, not the moving image, or video, of the moment.

Mr. Kelsey said the perfect example of this can be seen with the photo “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” by Joe Rosenthal, a photographer for The Associated Press. You would be hard-pressed to find someone who does not remember that iconic image, even today.

“There was film taken of the same scene at Iwo Jima that doesn’t bear any consideration,” Mr. Kelsey said. “Part of what makes that photo so extraordinary is all the contingent circumstances: It was the perfect moment. When you see all the moments on one side or the other, or moving, it looks banal, it drains away the magic of the moment.”

When I sat down on the couch last night at the end of the day to see what wonders people had documented on their smartphones and then posted online, I saw a lot of ephemeral videos of fireworks that I watched once and then continued on my way. But I did see one image that was being shared repeatedly on Facebook and Twitter that wasn’t a video on Vine, Instagram or YouTube.

Instead, it was a black and white photo (found here in the midst of a slideshow) taken by a Daily News photographer on July 4, 1986, of fireworks illuminating the Statue of Liberty during her 100th birthday celebration.

Something tells me that 100 years from now, we’ll still be sharing that photo on the Fourth of July, or one like it, not a futuristic video of the day.

Art Review: ‘Faking It’ at the Met, a Photography Exhibition

That photograph is one of more than 200 on display in “Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop,” an absorbing if not revelatory exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Organized by Mia Fineman, an assistant curator in the museum’s department of photography, the show offers abundant evidence that photographers have been cheating since shortly after the medium’s invention almost two centuries ago.

The types of images Ms. Fineman has in mind are not those that involve staging or altering scenes in front of the camera. She is not concerned with whether Roger Fenton moved the cannonballs in his photographs of Crimean War battlefields. She has focused, rather, on changes made in dark rooms and studios some time after the click of the shutter. So the exhibition features prints made from altered negatives; seemingly realistic images made by piecing together two or more negatives; hand-colored black-and-white prints; Surrealistic montages and the like. They date from 1846 to the early 1990s.

In Ms. Fineman’s view, the history of fakery in photography is as old as the medium itself. In her catalog essay she further asserts that “there is no such thing as an absolutely unmanipulated photograph.” This is less controversial than it sounds. Today only a viewer of childlike naïveté would not recognize that the technical processes that bring a print to its finished state necessarily involve considerable shaping of the supposedly virginal reality captured by the camera.

A technical problem in the 19th century, for example, was that photographic emulsions were disproportionately sensitive to blue and violet light, resulting almost always in overexposed skies. So like many other landscape photographers, Carlton E. Watkins inserted properly exposed clouds from a different negative into the blank sky in a grand view of cliffs along the Columbia River in Oregon that he shot in 1867. In the exhibition you can compare one print without and one with the interloping clouds. Though artificially produced, the print with clouds looks more natural.

But, you might ask, is tweaking to achieve more realistic effects in the same category as flimflam? At about the same time that Watkins was photographing out West, the journeyman studio photographer William H. Mumler made a name for himself selling “spirit photographs,” in which ghostly visitors appeared in portraits of real people. If you look at his prints now, it is hard to believe that anyone could have been deceived by them, but many were, until the law intervened and charged him with fraud and larceny.

And then again, is Harry Shunk’s “Leap Into the Void” (1960), the famous photograph of the Conceptual artist Yves Klein diving out of a second-story window above an empty street, in the same category as Mumler’s spirit photographs? Along with the picture of Klein’s supposedly netless jump, another shows people on the ground holding up a tarpaulin to catch him safely.

These puzzling questions become even more confounding when you consider the exhibition’s obviously trick photographs, like those of giant ears of corn on flatbed railroad cars or of celebrities whose heads have been grafted onto anonymous bodies. Such images have been circulating throughout popular culture for more than a century, and at this point few sentient people remain unaware that photographs can be, and often have been, altered to amuse, advertise, propagandize and deceive, as well as to increase aesthetic palatability.

That being the case, the exhibition is not terrifically newsworthy, though it is consistently interesting and often entertaining. Note, for example, a group of jokey 19th-century images by various artists of still living people with their heads displaced from their necks.

To make sense of it all, you need to understand that Ms. Fineman’s mission is to challenge something that is absent from the show: a different view of photography that prevailed among the intelligentsia for most of the 20th century. That was the idea that a great photograph must be transparently truthful. Canonized eminences of modern photography, from Stieglitz and Weston to Arbus and Winogrand, took the world straight, with no cosmetic or fantastic chaser. What they and their cameras saw was putatively what you got.

But the truthfulness of straight photography came under suspicion in the 1970s, most resoundingly in Susan Sontag’s “On Photography,” which indicted the medium for voyeurism and other crimes. Since then, doubting the capability of any representational system to convey naked truth has become obligatory in academic circles. The advent of digitization and Photoshop-type software has only affirmed the now orthodox conviction that not only does reality elude representation but also that truth itself may be just a misleading chimera.

(Ms. Fineman has also organized “After Photoshop: Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age,” a small, separate exhibition of works by contemporary artists using Photoshop and similar software, which is at the Met through May 27.)

We are left, then, to wonder. If photography cannot capture truth, what is it good for? Leaving aside the ever-increasing use of imaging technology for identification, surveillance, scientific and medical discovery and so on, what is its special purpose as far as art is concerned? While a good answer to that question does not emerge from this exhibition, it offers much that any new theories must take into account.

“Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop” runs through Jan. 27 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.