Fakeography

What 2800? The B+W original is clearly a Hall.

 

Thanks - the original print said a 2800, but from many other prints by the same author I know that he made mistakes in his later years.

 

The World as presented to us is fake, and always has been. We construct a reality in our minds. Whether an objective reality exists has been discussed at least since the time of Parmenides.

 

Yes, but some people, myself included, try to correct this and present the world as it really was. People have been stealing from each other since time began but that doesn't make it right,

We learn from the past. We can't do that if the past is someone's - or some thing's - imagination.

 

Ever since Photoshop was invented photographers have been tinkering with images - adjusting lighting, removing overhead wires, editing vegetation etc. It's been happening for years, long before AI arrived. Historians of the future that are researching the 21st century railway line will come to all sorts of erroneous conclusions just by looking at all the photos that are out there at the moment.

 

Even before Photoshop !. I have a book by Les Nixon in which he describes adding exhaust to a shot of 4498 which had none using a second negative of a completely different loco.

The darkroom process was never just one of always giving the same exposure across all areas of a photograph, dodging and burning allowed exactly the same selective processing of an image as Photoshop masking does these days.
It's easier from a comfy chair in front of the computer rather than wasting expensive paper on test prints in a dark room among trays of noxious chemicals.
Shooting transparency film was the only real way of producing a photo which would when projected represent an unaltered image. (and that's open to debate !)

Nothing has really changed with digital photography other than to make photo processing easier and therefore open to more people who would never have had access to a dark room.
It's always been the case that the presented image is the photographers interpretation of what the camera captured (or editors in the case of published photos).

All the industry processing software is beginning to have AI driven processes, noise management being prominent. And it's interesting to see that many competitions these days ask that entries be accompanied by the original image from the camera, and some use software to detect AI manipulation.

For many of us the satisfaction from photography is as much the experience of 'being there' as the picture taken. I'm not sure I do or ever will understand what satisfaction anyone gets from creating a falsehood using AI driven processing. Fortunately what software seems to be available to the market currently seems insufficiently mature to create flawless images as evidenced by John's original post.

 

Ever since plate photography was invented, Victorian photographers tinkered with images as a means of deception. The paranormal and spiritualism was popular so photographers of their time were able to "evidence" these beliefs from the darkroom.

 

It's all beyond my electronic abilities.

But, if an image is presented digitally, does the meta data (sp) not reveal the changes?

 

Metadata can be manipulated. Also, take a screenshot of any image and you lose the metadata.

 

Agree with every word of that Scot. Even in film days an image was only an approximation of what the eye saw, a transparency on Agfa film looked different to the same scene using Kodak. Having said that looking at some of the pictures taken in the 60s some of the results are amazing, Paul Riley took some great pictures using the same 400mm Prinzflex lens I had but I couldn’t get anything approaching a good image out of it. At only £20 I’m sure the lens glass was made from recycled milk bottles! I remember discussions on how to minimise grain, perversely I now sometimes add it to a b/w conversion to replicate the effect of TriX and HP5 film. Pushing Trix to 800ISO was considered adventurous, now you can add a nought to that and still get decent digital results.

I think we all have our own personal rules on what is acceptable, I will remove non permanent items in an image such as people or the big red bus that seems to always be crossing the bridge in the background at the wrong time. The same picture could be taken at a different time with the basic scene looking the same, having said that if I submit a doctored image for publication I will always declare what I’ve done to it. As an example the original of the attached picture at Beamish had about half a dozen people in modern clothing standing at the tram stop, all removed using the AI remove tool in Photoshop CC. I isolated the lady in Edwardian dress as I wanted her to remain. Is it acceptable or not? Being able to convert day to night or changing morning to sunset and then passing it off as original is a whole new ball game and to be regretted in my opinion.

 

Remember Kenneth Williams in Hancock's Half Hour? He was an outraged passport photographer:

Snaps? SNAPS ???? I don't take snaps. I paint, with light...

 

Is removing people acceptable? I had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (by freakish good luck, not even planned) to take a photo of the Hastings DEMU in Scotland. An apparent fellow railway fan walked down the platform and ruined the photo ... I could remove him using AI, but I used ancient and carefully-guarded Photoshop skills, passed down from apprentice bodger to apprentice bodger: