Where Do We Draw the Line? The Ethics of Editing
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A bit over a year ago, I made one of my most rewarding photographs, “Mountain Stream at Sunrise Beneath the Minarets.” I hiked out to a stream by my campsite during a backpacking trip to photograph sunrise alpenglow on the Minarets, a set of jagged peaks in the Ansel Adams Wilderness in California and found a set of small cascades positioned perfectly in line with the mountains. Though I had visualized the picture, creating it proved rather difficult. I leaned against the bank of the stream, balanced my tripod and camera precariously on some rocks, and noticed a few stray blades of grass occupying the bottom right corner of my frame. Not wanting them to distract the viewer, I tried to sweep them back to prevent them from being in the photograph.
The sun came out and I found myself occupied with balancing the exposure and making sure my film could handle both the scene’s highlights and shadows. When I received the film back, I figuratively jumped for joy when I saw that the exposure had turned out perfectly. But my excitement diminished when I noticed one small detail which had escaped my attention: those stray blades of grass had made it into every single shot, and they lingered in the bottom righthand corner of the picture, taunting me for my inattention to detail.
My first reaction to the oversight was to clone out the grass in Lightroom, which left a nice clean image (see below). I had pondered whether I should keep the edit, but I thought that the overall merits of the photograph outweighed what was ultimately a minor change. I posted it on social media and told the story of how I had created that photograph without disclosing the alteration.
A few months after, when I went through my back catalog, I came across the picture again. This time I reevaluated how ethical boundaries. Did I alter the intrinsic message behind the photograph? Had I deceived my viewers in posting that picture without disclosing that I had removed subject matter? I worried that perhaps I had. Now I felt less comfortable with the change.
I decided to re-edit the photograph without resorting to cloning out the offending blades of grass. That task proved trickier than anticipated as it forced me to reframe the picture and make visual compromises. In the end, I cropped out the grass entirely, resulting in the photograph below. The framing isn’t ideal, as I liked having more room at the bottom of the picture. Nevertheless, I’m satisfied with the result.
In hindsight, I wish I had disclosed the original edit. Even though it did not necessarily alter the intrinsic meaning of the photo or misrepresent the scene, I felt that its very existence opened the door for doubt on the authenticity and truthfulness of my photography. The experience made me realize that I did not feel comfortable with altering any subject matter in my work.
Why did I feel this way? In wrestling with this photographic dilemma, I had to contemplate my own principles. It pushed me to evaluate my own seemingly contradictory views on the ethics of photo manipulation. If someone today asked me about my stance, I would tell them that I have no problem with changing the lighting and shadow detail within my photos, but I refuse to clone out subject matter for the sake of “cleaning up” a photograph or create a composite image of a scene that never existed by merging elements from different pictures.
Indeed, I have even unfollowed photographers on social media because of what I perceived to be dishonest photo manipulation—creating composite scenes that clearly did not exist in real life or grossly exaggerating visual effects (Photoshopping a fake, oversized moon into a picture, for instance)—and doing so without disclosing those edits.
Granted, those are extreme examples. Subtler manipulation, like the change I had made, presents more difficult and thought-provoking questions. Two of my favorite landscape photographers are Ansel Adams and Galen Rowell. They could not have been more different. While Adams mainly used large and medium format cameras for his work, Rowell exclusively used 35mm film. The two men also shared another key difference: they held significantly differing views on photographic editing and manipulation. Adams famously used dodging and burning to alter the look of his most famous photographs (most notably for Moonrise, Hernandez), and in some cases he went even farther than that. In his book Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, Adams recounted the story behind his photograph “Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, California”:
“The enterprising youth of the Lone Pine High School had climbed the rocky slopes of the Alabama Hills and whitewashed a huge white L P [the letters “L” and P”] for the world to see. It is a hideous and insulting scar on one of the great vistas of our land, and shows in every photograph made of the area. I ruthlessly removed what I could of the L P from the negative (in the left-hand hill), and have always spotted out any remaining trace in the print. I have been criticized by some for doing this, but I am not enough of a purist to perpetuate the scar and thereby destroy — for me, at least — the extraordinary beauty and perfection of the scene.”[1]
Rowell, on the other hand, stood firmly on the other end of the spectrum. He believed that “nature photographers have a sacred trust to print no more or less than what was actually before their lenses, unless the image is disclosed as digitally altered or presented as digital art.”[2] His gallery website stated that, “He never added subject matter or colors not present at the scene, nor removed distractions, such as twigs or wires.”
Rowell spoke out strongly against what he saw as the dangers of photographic manipulation. He wrote in his book Galen Rowell’s Inner Game of Outdoor Photography that:
“When we alter an image to draw attention to an effect that wasn't there on the original film or in the eye of the beholder, we are using the belief system inherent in 160 years of photography to create a false impression that this unusual image represents something film recorded in the natural world. To say that somewhere in there remains a real vision of nature is as bogus as trying to convince someone that a counterfeit $1000 bill created by adding zeros to a ten-spot is really okay because the original bill does represent a certain value held in trust in the national coffers.”[3]
On the face of it, I should take issue with Adams’s photography. After all, he admitted to removing subject matter in his pictures, something that I have decided not to do. And yet, I still enjoy his work without a second thought. Why is that?
I realized that the apparent inconsistency stems from my perception of honesty. In other words, did I think Adams was being honest with his work? He openly talked about his photo editing and disclosed those facts to the public. Adams made no pretenses to the fact that the photograph he created and printed differed from the reality he saw in front of him. In other words, he did not hide his alterations or attempt to pass them off as unadulterated depictions of what he saw. If we found out that the scene Adams photographed in “Winter Sunrise” never existed and that he had created it out of whole cloth, my view of his work would be very different.
This gets to a core principle. We generally trust nature photographers to present a reasonably accurate and believable depiction of reality. Rowell put it best when he observed that:
“To succeed, every photograph must tell a story that we accept in the long tradition of the tales our ancestors told around campfires. We only believe a story if we believe in the human being telling it. This is why I feel so deceived if I later learn that a nature image I’ve contemplated with awe doesn’t reflect what the photographer actually saw.”[4]
Photographs can lie just as easily as words do, so we photographers have an obligation to be credible. Yet that still leaves us with my original question, “where do we draw the line?” All of us will inevitably come to different conclusions based on differing notions of truthfulness and artistic license.
For my own work, I’ve found that I identify most with Rowell’s stance. Ultimately my litmus test is: “If I told someone about this edit, do I think they would feel differently about my photograph?” For some, knowing that I cloned out the grass in my picture makes no difference in their emotional reaction. Yet others might differently and think that the photograph is less meaningful or wonder whether I’ve changed something else more significant. The possibility of casting any doubt on my work is reason enough for me to err on the side of caution.
Photographic ethics is obviously a complex, multifaceted issue. I hope to write several more articles on the topic, and I welcome your thoughts. Where do you draw the line? You can go ahead and leave a comment here or email me at cchiu@calvinchiuphotography.com. I hope to share some of your responses in a future article.
[1] Ansel Adams, Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1983), 164-165.
[2] Galen A. Rowell, Galen Rowell's Inner Game of Outdoor Photography (W.W. Norton, 2001), 271.
[3] Ibid, 225.
[4] Ibid, 228.