An Essay on Digital Image Manipulation

Surfing through the internet, trying to find resources in support of my thesis, I came across an essay by Chuck Doswell entitled, "An Essay on Digital Image Manipulation." This essay is a relatively reader friendly account of the changes and repercussions associated with digital imagery, but it was Doswell's section discussing "Photography and Truth," which caught my attention first. Doswell seems to have come to a conclusion that is incredibly similar to my own thesis statement, in that he claims, " The whole notion of photographic truth has been on a slippery slope toward being discredited for some time, as the image manipulators have become more sophisticated, but in my opinion the concept of such truth has always been in dubious foundations." Doswell supports this opinion stating that the 'tricks of the photography trade" were developed and practiced long before the advent of digital imaging. To him, for a photo to be completely "pure" or truthful, "all photographic manipulations would have to be avoided: no filters, no flash, no push/pull processing, no choice of film emulsion, no spotting and retouching, no composition, no cropping, etc." Therefore, it is the subjectivity found in the photographic process that actually negates the undisrupted or absolute truth of the representation.
In this essay, Doswell claims that two things have occurred as a result of the advent of digital imaging, first, the tools for sophisticated image manipulation have now been made available to a wider amount of people, and second, the sophistication of these tools have increased the photographic realism of digital images, to the point where we can no longer tell what is real and what has been computer generated. According to Doswell, it is this second change that will eventually completely deny the notion of photographic truth. In his words, this change "will have the ultimate impact of making a digital 'photograph' as unreliable for evidence of 'truth' as an artist's painting." Essentially, Doswell is making a parallel between digital manipulation and painting. To me, this connection between digital manipulation and painting is especially interesting. It could be said that, we have created technologies that could increase or improve photographic truth, but at the same time, these technological advances have made it easier for us to photographically "lie." Thus, we can see the paradox within digital imaging, that it not only gives us the ability to recreate reality in absolute truthfulness, but it also allows us to more easily manipulate or lie about reality. In addition, digital imaging also allows us to create all new "virtual realities," something that previously could only be done in painting. So, with digital imaging, it as if we have explored technology to an extent in which we have made a complete revolution, and we find ourselves back where we started, painting our reality.