I like to remember things my
own way. [...] How I remember them. Not necessarily the way they happened.
"- Lost Highway (1997).
“No individual photo explains
anything. That’s what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic
medium. It is the photographer’s job to get this medium to say what you need it
to say. Because photography has a certain verisimilitude, it has gained a
currency as truthful – but photographs have always been convincing
lies.” - Stephen Leslie
Photographs have been lying
for a long time. There are also numerous known cases of analogue images where
there has been "cheating":
Robert Capa (1936 - Falling
Soldier); The Grief (Dmitri Balterman's 1942); "Raising a flag over
Reichstag" (Yevgeny Khaldei - 1945); Doisneau 1950 Le baiser de l'hôtel de
ville; Ruth Orkin (American Girl in Italy - 1951); Fan Ho (Aproaching Shadow -
1954);
Of course the invention of
digital photography and the greater accessibility of photo editing software
have made it much easier, more frequent and perfect to change / manipulate
images. As a result people no longer have the same faith in photography as a
receptacle of truth.
Reportage Photo has been lying
increasingly through more and more manipulation.
In 2015, 22% of the 6,000
competitors to the World Press Photo Contest were eliminated because they
passed the red line of manipulation (subtracting or adding objects to the
original image).
Of course the sense tells us
that there should be a red line. Above all, do not add or subtract elements
that did not exist in the image. For the rest it seems appropriate to use the
tools of Lightroom as before when doing dodge and burn in analogue photos.
Cartier-Bresson and other
great analogue-era photographers did not spare the dodge and burn experts to
work on their images. I remember Dennis Stock’s iconic portrait of James Dean
in Times Square and the work of Inirio from Magum.
Today the act of photographing
with any device is always linked to algorithms. If we must have an absolute
fidelity to what our eyes see as reality then maybe someone radical should also
consistently "ban" also B&W photography because it does not
convey reality as we see it.
Sometimes I think that the
main problem with "Street Photography" is the stubbornness of some
people who try to impose and generalize their own definition as a canonical
rule that the world of photographers must follow. Definition that reflects only
his own way to seeing and photographing.
When you are framing you are
already changing the apparent reality because you have isolated only a small
part that can lead us to see something different from what actually happened.
Each photograph is a fiction
that is presented as true. Against what they have made us believe and against
what we think, photography always lies. Because reality is a lie of our senses,
in consequence, photography is a lie about a lie.
I am sure that great
photographers (such as Garry Winogrand) of the past were not concerned with
definitions while photographing. So they did a good job.
I think that after all it will
be necessary to have prudence and sense - as in everything in life.
The documentary impulse is always
at a crossroads where the divergent roads of Creativity and Fidelity leave. And
I think it would not be a good choice to give up from Creativity.
