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Pixels and Pictorialism: A Reply to Jonathan Friday

By Nigel Warburton

In his recent article on digital imaging [1], Jonathan Friday takes the line that digital technology has given us the possibility of a new kind of image, one which 'can have all of the surface visual qualities of a photograph and yet possess representational properties different in kind to those of traditional photography' (p.7). His reasoning is that because digital imaging permits pixel by pixel manipulation of an image, the causal link back to subject matter can be broken. These 'photographs' have an intentional relationship to their subject matter; traditional photographs, he tells us, have a causal relation to their subject matter. The result of traditional photography is, from the point of view of representation, 'nothing more than relatively precise evidence of how something looked at a certain time under certain conditions'. Now, at last, he thinks, we can begin to have an aesthetic interest in photographic (or rather 'photographic') representation; before pixels, our aesthetic interest in photography couldn't ever be an interest in photographic representation per se.

In essence this is an extension of the position developed by Roger Scruton in his famously provocative article 'Photography and Representation'.[2] Like Scruton's, Friday's approach is fundamentally misguided. There is no doubt that digital imaging gives rise to new uses of photographic media and that the results are in some respects different in kind from previous uses. However, Friday fails to distinguish differences in kind from differences in degree, with the result that he seriously misrepresents photography's past, its present, and, consequently, probably also its future.

There are four principal features of digital imaging which distinguish it from past photographic practice: [3]

1. Ease of manipulation

2. Difficulty of detecting manipulation

3. Move from analogue to digital representation

4. Ease of transmission

1. Ease of Manipulation

Almost from the day of the invention of photography photographers have been aware of the many ways in which they can intervene in the optico-chemical process to produce the effects they want. The whole range of darkroom techniques, choices of material, and so on can significantly affect the look of the final image. However, such manipulation of photographic images has until recently required a high level of skill and considerable time. Now, with the new technology it is relatively simple to make seamless changes to photographs. However, this is only a change in degree. Manipulation is easier than it was, but not different in kind (at least as far as the results are concerned) from what was possible before, given time and skill. Against this obvious point that new photography isn't significantly different from traditional photography in its control of the imaging process, but only facilitates the sort of activity that a skilled technician could have achieved at just about any point in photography's history, Friday makes the claim that specifically photographic techniques (or at least the ones he chooses to enumerate), with the exception of retouching, 'produce a global and uniform effect over the appearance of all the objects depicted'(p.9). If this claim is meant to be a description of what traditional photographers actually do and have done, it is patently false; if it isn't, then it is completely irrelevant to his argument. Photographic techniques such as dodging and burning in, when skilfully applied, give the technician control over minute areas of the representing surface: the equivalent of the pixel by pixel manipulation of which Friday makes so much. This allows photographers to do what Friday thinks traditionally they could not, namely 'alter the appearance of an object in order to provoke a spectator to see it differently, or to express a thought about it' (p.9). Pixel based image-making doesn't constitute a difference in kind from this, and often not even one of degree. It is only the means by which such effects are achieved, and the speed and ease with which they are achieved that has changed.

2. Difficulty of Detecting Manipulation

Friday claims , without any supporting evidence, that 'before the invention of digital imaging it was always possible, with the right training and equipment, to say with at least a very high degree of certainty whether a photograph had been doctored' (p.8). This is by no means obviously true. A skilled technician who makes composite prints, or air-brushes details of a print and then rephotographs the result leaves very few, if any, visible traces. Furthermore, many images which have been 'doctored' by digital imaging techniques reveal their origins to the skilled interpreter. Again, there only seems at most to be a difference in degree between traditional photographic and new digital imaging techniques. The real differences lie elsewhere. One of these is that digital imaging doesn't involve negatives, so there is not the same archival source to go back to to look for discrepancies as there is with traditional photography [4]. However, this simply puts the viewer of digital images in the same position that viewers of traditional photographs are in when a negative is lost, destroyed or hidden. Furthermore, some traditional photographic processes such as Polaroid photographs and transparencies don't produce a negative and so are closer in this respect to the products of the new technology.

3. Change from Analogue to Digital

Digital photography is what so many people have claimed traditional photography was: an intrinsically reproducibile medium. Analogue photography did not provide any compliance conditions which would allow us to say simply from looking at an image that it was a token of the same type as another image. Causal history, in the sense of which negative it was printed from, rather than its appearance, determined whether or not it was a print of the same photograph [5]. Contrast this with books: a book with the correct words is a further token of the same type. Now, with digital imaging, at least at the level of image files, we can talk about photography as intrinsically reproducible. The trouble is that we are still left with possible differences in the way that hardware prints from these files. But now that we have a digital notation for complex images, it makes far more sense to draw the analogy between printing photographs and performing from a musical score than it once did. Here then is a genuine difference of kind, rather than of degree between traditional photography and new imaging processes.

4. Transmissibility

A significant consequence of the digital coding of new photographs is that such images can be transmitted electronically without loss of quality. Furthermore, we can know that this has been achieved - this is a difference in kind from earlier photography. This will have a profound effect on our visual communication.

Pictorialism in Photography

Like many writers on the philosophy of photography, Friday has failed to acknowledge the wide range of uses of photographic materials. In particular he has ignored the tradition of pictorialism in photography, a tradition which stretches back almost to the year of photography's invention. By the late 1850s, photographers such as Oscar Rejlander had mastered the art of combination printing to the extent that they could create a seamless image from a large number of negatives. Perhaps the most famous of Rejlander's pictures, 'The Two Ways of Life' (1857), is an allegorical composition of about thirty figures: a young man in the act of choosing between virtue and licentiousness. It was made by combination printing of a large number of negatives.The sort of picture that Rejlander created here is not significantly different in kind from those produced by present day pixel-manipulators.

Put simply, in contrast to documentary uses of photography, pictorial ones don't require that the subject matter of a photograph was one of its immediate causal antecedents: it may or may not be, but that is largely irrelevant to the viewer. What matters with pictorial photographs is what the picture represents iconically, not what it is indexically of [6]. Pictorial photography is, pace Friday (and Scruton), fictionally competent, adept even. This is easiest to see in the case of cinema. Consider the following account from a biography of Alfred Hitchcock: One day Hitch watched Murnau setting up and shooting a short scene on the platform of a railway station where a train has just come in. The carriage nearest the camera was the real thing, with passengers getting on and off. Then the next few carriages were constructed in forced perspective to give the impression of receding into the distance in a very small space. But such was Murnau's concern for detail that to give life to the background he had placed another full-size railway carriage in the far distance across the lot, with passengers getting in and out of it, in such a way that when photographed the foreshortened fake carriages would neatly join up the two far-separated real carriages. What you can see on the set does not matter, explained Murnau - the only truth that counts is what you see on the screen.[7] To insist that this was a photographic representation of what was on the set rather than a photographic representation of a complete train is to miss the point. It also involves a serious distortion of the nature of cinema. Similarly Friday's account of photography traditional and new distorts both. Only by concentrating exclusively on documentary uses of photography, and ignoring the conventions and history of pictorialism, can he fit photography into the neat category of the non-intentional, fictionally incompetent causal process that is radically different from digital imaging. This is a convenient philosopher's category; but it has little to do with actual uses of the medium.

References

Jonathan Friday, 'Digital Imaging, Photographic Representation and Aesthetics' Ends and Means 1 (1997) pp.7-11
Roger Scruton' Photography and Representation', The Aesthetic Understanding (London, Methuen, 1983) pp.102-26
I have discussed these four features of photography in relation to phoptojournalism in 'Ethical Photojournalism in the Age of the Electronic Darkroom', in Matthew Kieron (ed.) Media Ethics (London, Routledge, 1998) pp.123-134
For further discussion of this point, see Fred Ritchin In Our Own Image (New York, Aperture, 1990) which provides an excellent discussion of the ways in which computer technology is affecting photographic communication.
For a discussion of which photographic prints should be considered authentic from the point of view of an interest in photopgraphic art, see my 'Authentic Photographs', British Journal of Aesthetics 37 1997 pp129-137.
For a fuller discussion of the documentary/pictorial distinction in photography see my 'Varieties of Photographic Representation', History of Photography 15 1991, pp.203-10.
John Russell Taylor Hitch (London, Faber, 19789) pp.56-7

Nigel Warburton is Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University

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