Not really an Artist's Statement but rather a statement from the artist

One of the most frequently asked question I get is, "Are these pictures real?" The implication is that the image has been manipulated or altered in some way.

With the advent of digital photography and the use of software programs to process these digital images, photography has come under an increased skepticism. The ease with which images can be altered has increased to such a point that many people are skeptical as to the accuracy of any image regardless of who the photographer is or where they see the image.

But is altering an image always a bad thing? 

The answer is both yes and no. Altering an image in any significant way while making the claim that the image is “unaltered” is deceitful and seeks to take advantage of the viewer’s or buyer’s trust. But the truth is that  manipulating images has been an integral part of photography almost since its inception. 

Photographers make an image because they are trying to convey something that they felt at the time they made the exposure. An emotion; a thought; a feeling; something moved the photographer to record what he or she saw. The camera is nothing more than a recording device, it has no emotions, no feelings, no preconceived knowledge of what anything is or looks like, it just records what is in front of the lens. In order for the image to adequately convey what the photographer is trying to say, it usually must be manipulated in some way.

In the days of film photography photographers manipulated their images in one of two basic ways, either by film choice or darkroom technique. All film responds to light in different ways. Similar but different. All films record red as red, or blue as blue, or green as green but all record these colors in varying shades and hues of these colors. Knowledgeable photographers used these variations to their advantage in order to obtain the image they wanted to make. If a photographer knew that certain films had a soft or subdued color palette and their goal was to make an image that was soft or subdued, then they would choose films that exhibited these characteristics. If the photographer wanted to make a very powerful and awe-inspiring image they would choose a film that had a more intense color palette. Neither accurately depicted the real scene.

In 1990 Fuji Corp. released the first generation of a new film that would forever change the way we looked at the world. Fuji Velvia 50 was the first in a new type of film that featured increased contrast and highly saturated colors. Landscape photographers particularly loved this new film, in no small part because it rendered greens in such a way that they almost jumped off the paper, and it quickly became the standard by which all other films were measured. It gave their images a whole new look, one of almost unbelievable intensity and color. But it was not an accurate interpretation of reality. Beautiful, intense, powerfully colorful yes, but not accurate. Soon after the release of Velvia and the subsequent overwhelming acceptance of this new look, all major film manufacturers reworked their films to be more vivid with increased saturation and contrast. For the last twenty five years of film photography almost all the public saw were images made with these high saturation films and we accepted the images as accurate. We accepted images that were fairly significant manipulations of reality without as much as a raised eyebrow. 

The truth is we’ve been looking at manipulated images practically since the dawn of photography and didn’t know, or didn’t care, and in some cases even admired the photographers for their ability to manipulate their images. We called it “Art”. 

Each and every one of us sees the world differently. We see things and our responses are based in large part on our past. Our past experiences play a major role in how we see and react to everything around us. We all know that the sky is blue, but two people standing right next to each other and looking at the same sky, one who has grown up in the mid-west and one who has grown up in Los Angeles, will see a different blue. Their perception of what constitutes blue will be different based on their past experiences. 

The camera does not see with any preconceived ideas or emotions, it has no past experiences to tell it that clouds are ephemeral, or that rocks are hard, or that water is wet, or that the sky is blue. It is merely a tool that records what is in front of it. It is up to the photographer to use whatever tools that are available to convey what it is they are trying to say when they make an image, to tell us how they see the blue in the sky. 

Any serious photographer who seeks to create meaningful and/or artistic images must in some way manipulate the image in order to convey what it was they felt at the time the image was made. 

In the end, the final print is all that really matters, not how the result was achieved. You either like the image or you don't, how it was achieved is mostly unimportant. Manipulation always has been and always will be a tool, used wisely, in order to produce images that are memorable and meaningful. 

Ansel Adams, arguably the most well-known and respected photographer of the twentieth century, routinely produced ten to twenty prints from the same negative using different darkroom techniques until he got a print that met his standards and expectations and looked the way ‘he’ wanted it to look. One could say without exaggeration that he was not only a master photographer but also a master of image manipulation. 

Image manipulation is only a bad thing when it is denied. 

For the record; the answer to the question at the beginning of this statement is yes, all of my prints are manipulated in some way.

Example here