Phototruth or Photofiction? Ethics and Media Imagery in the Digital Age
Book by Tom Wheeler; Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002

Foreword
It has been 20 years since computers were first used to process photographic imagery in the mass media. Almost since the first day, photojournalists have expressed concern about the computer's ability to alter the realistic imagery captured by their cameras. The ethics of digital imaging have increasingly dominated discussions among journalists-first the photographers, then their editors, and finally their managers. The chemical photograph with its imperceptible transition from black to white through an infinite number of grays seemed for more than a century so easy to understand. A photo was reality. It was a scientific document. We could understand how lenses worked and could predict how chemical reac- tions would occur, and we believed the photograph was as objective as mathematics and as clear a view as glass provides.

Now, at the start of the 21st Century, photography has passed from the confident realm of chemistry to the ethereal world of electronics. For more and more people, a photograph is simply a bit of software, a long series of 0's and 1's that are more like an idea than a crystal of salt or the fibers of the paper you now hold in your hand. Indeed, you cannot hold a digital image at all. While a negative is a thing, a JPEG file is more a formula than anything tangible. Each formula is built from essentially the same components- sequences of binary bits. Rearrange the bits a little and you have a spread- sheet of numbers. Rearrange them again and you have a poem by Longfellow. This most postmodern of phenomena is generally called convergence. It seems that everything can be represented by a formula that a computer can read to generate a semblance of the original. A human voice is rendered as a string of digits and emanates from the silvery surface of a CD. Or the formula could be a picture of the singer's face, or the words she used to compose the song, or the sales figures for that little disk of plastic. The di- rect relationship between the media that stores the creative work and the work itself is gone now. A negative is not a piece of acetate. A musical score is not paper. A painting is not canvas.

This convergence has transformed all of our symbolic creations- numbers, letters, lines, shapes, notes, songs, whispers, cries, stories, and legends-into strings of simple switches that are either open or closed, on or off, yes or no. What were once beautifully different things are now con- verted into strangely similar nonthings. The sequence of binary data that is a digital photograph is the same re- gardless of the medium on which it is stored: floppy disk, hard drive, CD- ROM, or even numbers printed on a piece of paper; the thing it is stored upon is not representational. The photograph is just a bunch of digital bits, as simple as black and white. Odd then that this ultimate in simplicity, this fundamentally either/or standard, should have set off so much discussion about the gray areas of photojournalism. It is the ultimate paradox of media.Today the software that changes a frozen moment of time into a moment that never was is available to everyone with a personal computer. Some peo- ple are even ready to give up on the truth of photography altogether, as if the truth were resident in a magical place called a darkroom. They claim photog- raphy is dead. But the analogy of photographic truth to scientific rendering never fit, and it is quite obviously even more flawed now. Today all the world knows that a photograph is nothing more than a formula for arranging dots into a pattern that looks like something. Rearrange the dots on the com- puter screen and the pyramids are closer together. Rearrange the dots and a man is pregnant. Rearrange the dots and your ex-spouse never went on that vacation with you to the mountains.

Much to their credit, photojournalists recognized early on that the ease with which a computer could alter a photograph was a threat to their profes- sional credibility, and they began discussing the potential impact. The initial reaction was to more forcibly cling to the known. The National Press Pho- tographers Association defended the reality of the photographic image and pledged never to alter it. The Associated Press said they would not do any- thing on the computer that could not be done in a darkroom. For two decades photojournalists have engaged in an increasingly sophisticated dissection of what photographs mean to the reading public, of what history reveals about the veracity of photography in the past, and about what photo- graphic reporting is at its very essence. This self-examination has stirred up issues far more fundamental than simply the impact of another new technol- ogy. It has unearthed basic questions that are tied more firmly to philosophi- cal notions of truth and meaning than to chemical processes.