Objective Eggs-a DIY Photo-Zine

On Jörg Colberg's Photography and Manipulation: Defending History

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I have never met Jörg Colberg in person. What I know about him is from his remarkable and notable blog effort ‘Conscientious’, which is a source of contemporary photography from around the world. However, I was very disappointed to read his recent article titled ‘Photography and Manipulation’ (05/01/2012) and I feel the need to answer to him. For one, this is not a personal attack, but rather a deconstruction of his essay and also it is not an effort to defend communism, but to defend History.

In his article, Colberg, tries desperately to connect the recent manipulated picture of Kim Jong-il’s funeral march in North Korea with ‘creepy’, as he puts it, communism. Echoeing like ‘Ich bin ein Amerikaner’, he repeats the usual and tiring discourse that the institutional media uses when referring to ‘communism’.  ‘Communism’ has been long portrayed in the West as a synonym of evil, as hell on earth, as the worst possible system that a country could have or in its best as something that is too good to be true, an utopia. In recent years however there has been a growing attack towards the History of communism, even an effort to equate it to Hitler's Nazi regime and Colberg is no exception as he is pointing the finger at the North Korean regime in a ‘look, what the bad communists are doing again’ kind of way.

As it is well known, during the Stalinist era many images containing supposedly state enemies were manipulated and figures such as Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev and Nikolai Yezhov were erased from photographs, before they were ‘erased’ from life as well. But to take an image, a manipulated image, as an example in order to prove your point against ‘communism’ is rather a naïve way to go and most importantly it is against History and Collective Memory. Image manipulation is neither a characteristic of ‘communist’ regimes and nor did it start or end with them. It is rather a characteristic of every ideological and state apparatus in an Althusserian sense no matter their ideological, cultural, ethical, political, economic, philosophical differences. And it all comes down to Power (who, where, why, when and how is an image distributed and circulated) and the integrated force an image has as a form of knowledge.

We are accustomed to believe what our eyes see and even when we look at a photoshopped image in print, although we might know that it is not representing 100% reality we want to believe that it somehow relates to it. Moreover, culturally, we expect and demand news images to be as close to reality as possible (i.e look at the guidelines that the ‘big’ publications request from photojournalists when submitting images). However, one thing is to alter an image and another to manipulate History.

Regarding this particular image, it seems that the retoucher did not try to alter History through her/his manipulation. Yes, the retoucher did manipulate what was in front of the lens, but in this instance she/he does not try to manipulate Reality. I see it more as an ‘aesthetic’ effort, an effort to 'beautify' the scene and through this to pay her/his respect to the death of Kim Jong-il. Perhaps Colberg’s argument would have been more strong if the image was in such a way manipulated that it would interfere with an ‘objective’ depiction of the event. But, what I, the western viewer receive as a final mediated product, is the usual, polished, cropped, photoshopped image that the media have made the norm and I am accustomed to. This does not mean that I agree with the practice, but every photographer knows that from its very nature a photograph is a priori manipulated from the very decisions the photographer takes while composing her/his image.

Finally, if we are seeking ‘messed up state ideology’ as Colberg states, we do not need to look for it at the other side of the world, nor look for it at the ‘Other’ side. Let us just switch on our TV sets on the 6 o’clock news and it will all be there. Every line of speech and every image carefully manipulated to serve the interests of those who own the means of production. This is creepy and not a funeral in North Korea or this particular manipulated image. What is also creepy is an article like ‘Photography and Manipulation’ that not only tries to make a point out of nothing, but to manipulate collective consciousness. 'And we could connect that to the long history' ... of the bourgeois.

NOTE: My apologies to Jörg Colberg for previously misspelling his name.

The Family Picture Online: A Case Study of Flickr

‘Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen. The eye of the other combined with our own eye to make it fully credible that  we are part of the visible world'.

Berger 1972:9

The following paper will look into the social network website of Flickr. Because of its vast content, we will take as a case study family pictures that circulate in the website. More precisely, we will see how family pictures have immigrated from our microcosm, the traditional family album of our domestic environment, to cyberspace and the Online photostream of Flickr. Moreover, although, Flickr’s concept is based on photography, we will also investigate how language is used in creating meanings both by those that post pictures with text, but also those that comment on other users’ images. In the beginning of the essay we will briefly introduce Flickr, then we will demonstrate a theoretical approach, which later will be supported by specific examples found in the website.

Flickr was launched in Vancouver, Canada in 2004 by Ludicorp and was sold to Yahoo Inc. in 2005 (Richter and Schandler 2009:172). It is organised in a simple way so anyone can use it; you just need to register with Yahoo and then you are ready to upload your pictures for free.  With a free account you can upload up to 100 MB per month and you are able to look up to your last 200 uploaded images. However, if you pay the amount of $ 24.95 for a year then you get Flickr’s ‘pro account’ which includes ‘unlimited uploads and storage, unlimited sets and collections, access to your original files, stats on your account, ad-free browsing and sharing, HD playback for high-definition video uploads’ (Available from http://www.flickr.com/upgrade/).

With Flickr apart from uploading your images you can edit them, organize them in sets, join or create groups to share your pictures, show on a map the location where you took the picture and order prints, posters and photo books of your pictures. We see here how the consumer is at the same time the producer. Yahoo Inc. offers for a relatively cheap price a preconfigured online space in which the user is almost free to do what she/he wants regarding photography.

It is estimated that it has between 35 and 47 million users that have submitted more than 4 billion pictures and there are more than 73 million worldwide visitors each month. Although the numbers may seem impressive, there is a simple explanation for them. As David Bate put it, we are now experiencing the ‘third period of photography’, what he calls the ‘reconfiguration of photographic values in the computer’, which ‘begins-and accelerated-with the invention of the Internet’(Bate 2009:148). The Internet combined with the (r)evolution of digital cameras from the late 1980’s have created a new platform for photography. Today, almost everyone (at least in the West) carries a camera with her/him. Be it a camera phone, a digital compact one or a high-end DSLR, photography has proven once again that it is the most democratic medium ever invented (Price and Wells 2004:16-18).

Patricia Holland, long before the invention of social network sites, had argued that ‘family photography does not seek to be understood by all. It is a private medium, its simple imagery enriched by the meanings we bring to it. An ‘outside’ interpretation, an assessment of someone else’s album, moves into a different realm: of social history, ethnology or a history of photography’ (Holland 1991:2-3). Therefore, family photography was equivalent to the family album and vice versa. It was something that belonged to the family and close friends, rather than something you would show to your neighbour, let alone share it with someone you had never met before. In addition, in 1995, the year when the Casio QV-10 was launched as the first digital camera with a display, Don Slater in his famous essay ‘Domestic Photography and Digital Culture’ was saying that:

‘it is very early yet for the digital domestic snapshot, whether scanned, frame grabbed from a video or taken on a digital camera. Private images have not yet entered the datastream of either telecommunications or digital convergence’ (Slatter 1995:131).

It definitely was very early to make any assumptions back then, but today, the digital image, including the family picture, has spread everywhere and dominates most people’s relation to photography. Family photographs from being a private medium have entered the public sphere through the datastream of the Internet and can be widely found in social network sites such as Flickr. The shift from analogue to digital photography has brought at the same time a radical change in what people take pictures of. As Richter and Schadler have noted, ‘amateur photographers in the analogue age typically took pictures of special events’, whereas nowadays, everything can be photographed (Richter and Schandler 2009:169). The reason for this is that people do not have to print their photos as they did in the past, but they can keep them digitised in the hard discs of their PCs. Therefore, the digital camera owners have barely any cost in taking as many pictures as they like and then looking at the results on the computer’s screen. We can clearly see how digital photography and the Internet brought changes both in the way people take pictures and they way they store and share them.

The family picture could not remain unaffected by these changes. Nowadays, families can make pictures outside the ‘normal situation’ of holidays, parties, sports days and special events. This does not mean that ‘traditional’ family pictures are not produced anymore, but rather that digital photography has opened the possibility of taking many more and outside of the norm. As Patricia Holland put it: ‘Technological change influences the stories we tell ourselves about family life’ (Holland 1991:4).  But how do people use all these pictures that they make? InfoTrends, a market research firm serving the digital imaging industries, found ‘a strong correlation between those that are active photographers (capturing 75+ DSC photos or 25+ camera phone photos every three months) and those that are regular users of social networks. People who take a lot of photos clearly want to share them, and they are largely turning to social networks to do so’ (Available from http://www.infotrends.com). Therefore, Flickr hosts one’s desire of sharing her/his pictures not only with family and friends, but also with the outside world, with people one does not know and -most probably- will never meet.

However, beyond the obvious reasons someone has to share her/his pictures Online there is also the pleasure humans get from the act of looking at someone or something, namely scopophilia. As Laura Mulvey put it, in relation to cinema: ‘The cinema offers a number of possible pleasures. One is scopophilia (pleasure in looking). There are circumstances in which looking itself is a source of pleasure, just, as in the reverse formation, there is pleasure in being looked at’ (Mulvey 2009:16-17). Mulvey’s remark can be adopted by photography and we can see its use in the family pictures that are disseminated in Flickr in the examples that we will refer to later on. However, as we have already noted, even before the digital evolution, people tended to show their pictures to others, but surely not at the same extent as it happens today. As Roland Barthes notes in his canonical book, Camera Lucida:

‘Show your photographs to someone-he [sic] will immediately show you his [sic]: “Look, this is my brother; this is me as a child.” etc.; the Photograph is never anything but an antiphon of “Look,” “See,” “here it is”; it points a finger at certain vis-à-vis, and cannot escape this pure deictic language’ (Barthes 82:5).

Barthes’ comment not only shows the personal interchange and presentation of pictures that takes place between people, but also a reaction and need of the receiver to show also her/his own pictures. In relation to this, it should be mentioned that both the acts of ‘looking at’ and ‘being looked at’, in Flickr, are not something static and personal, but rather they become active through language. Murray in her essay about Flickr commented that ‘it (Flickr) is also one of the rare sites centred more on image than in text’ (Murray 2008:149). Murray has very carefully used the word ‘centred’ to describe the importance of the image rather than the text in Flickr. However, we cannot underestimate the role that language plays in the website. To quote Barthes again: ‘The text is indeed the creator’s (and hence society’s) right of inspection over the image…’ (Barthes 1977:40). We should rather take it under consideration and look its effects very carefully, from the simple act of typing a word in the search box in order to find a photo to how each picture is characterized, by what is called ‘tagging’ and the meaning that are created by the users’ comments.

Tagging is of great importance here as it demonstrates the power that the users and members have by attaching what they would consider as a meaningful word to an image. As Martin Lister et al put it: ‘Flickr allows users to create a huge Online image database tagged by its users. ‘’Folksonomy’’ is thus defined here as a people-led practice of knowledge classification in contradiction to the traditional expert led taxonomy of knowledge.’ (Lister 2009:223). But this does not end here. Any user can also add tags to another user’s picture (unless the user has changed her/his settings in relation to who can and cannot add a tag in her/his photostream). With this option the meaning of each picture is open to an active interpretation which becomes a language game. Therefore, the pictures in Flickr like all images) are polysemous, and this is especially demonstrated by the comments, but also by the tag system that Flickr has. As Barthes put it: ‘…all images are polysemous; they imply, underlying their signifiers, a ‘floating chain’ of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others…’ (Barthes 1977: 38-39). Therefore, the tags impose on each image a meaning, which derives from the knowledge, theory, psychology, memory of each user and this shows the power that the Flickr member has in interpreting, changing, influencing the meaning of the initial photo, which was taken. This justifies Barthes, when he claimed that the ‘author is dead’ (Barthes, 1977:142-148). Once you upload your picture Online, its meaning and interpretation is left open to the viewer and she/he can alter it. (Of course the author can describe the picture, give her/his own meaning and defend her/his creation, or even delete the photo). 

Let us now see at specific examples from Flickr to support our arguments so far. We will show how different family pictures can be found in the Flickr photostream from the ones that we are stereotypically used to in seeing in family albums and how language can be used in relation to them. One example will showcase comments and the other tags. We will begin with user ‘Shane Neufeld Photography’ (Available from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/undey/1099191332/in/set-72157600005858545/). The title ‘First Family (self) portrait’, tells us that the picture is made from the photographer himself. The couple invites us in their bedroom to spend some time with them, by looking at them in their bed, in one of the most important periods a couple might experience, pregnancy. The tones of the picture are soft, like the moment the picture depicts, transferring a rather harmonious and calm feeling to the viewer. However, at the same time that the picture is posted online, it is open to the vulgarity of our gaze. Do we like or envy what we see? Do we see ourselves in the picture? The couple is looking at us-the viewer giving a sense of knowing them or them being comfortable with sharing this moment of their lives. It is not a random snapshot photograph taken in the domestic environment; the woman has brushed hair, wears lipstick and gently covers her breasts with her arms. Her partner/husband has gently positioned his head on her belly and has put his arm around her, something that shows he plays the role of the ‘protective man’, not only for her, but also for the baby soon to come.

The photograph does not belong to the pictures we are used to see in family albums, but rather it could be a stock image. However, if we were to see this image in a stock image website, our intention would most probably be to buy it or even to research such pictures. In Flickr though, it has a different purpose, it is there to be shared with the world and people have joined to interact with each other. Therefore, it would be quite safe to say that the couple exposes itself expecting some kind of ‘reward’. A reward not only for the ‘artistic value’ the photograph may have, but also for the moment they are experiencing. Here are some of the comments other members left:

The comments are very different to each other and each user brings in her/his own desires, connotations and experiences.  OldhaMedia for example regrets the fact that when she was pregnant did not make any pictures like this. The same applies to shbnggrth, who although he is a male talks about ‘our pregnancies’ that obviously his partner/wife previously had and not himself. However, it seems as if he totally feels the state that this family is in and advises them to frame the picture, put it on the wall and even make more.

What follows is a picture posted by user danitza, titled ‘3 months + 8 days’. The subtitle of the photograph reads ‘Self portrait with Niklas’. If we did not have the title and subtitle of the picture we could suggest it was an advertising picture promoting a domestic product. The picture’s soft tones and being black and white could make us think towards this direction, because of the thousands of advertisements we have seen with a similar subject matter. The title and subtitle give away that the picture is a self-portrait, with a baby called Niklas, which is 3 months and 8 days old. A family album would rarely-if at all- contain a picture like this. Most probably a family album would contain pictures of the mother playing or sleeping with her child, portraying a snapshot aesthetic rather than a ‘studio pose’ in front of the camera like in this example. Moreover, the fact that this picture is a self-portrait shows the new dimension and paradigm shift that digital photography has brought. The photographer-mother, in a similar way to the picture previously described, looks directly at us, while at the same time protectively holding her son. Digital photography allows people to experiment, edit and manipulate their photography out of the narrow ‘event-only’ use, even in domestic photography. Here is a list with the tags that the user has put for her picture.

The user allows other members to add tags to her photos justifying Lister’s description of flickr as a folksonomy. This shows us both how democratic the medium is, but at the same time that since an image is circulated the author is dead and the masses take control over what the picture means for each of them. Although, most of the tags can directly be associated with the image there are some that make no sense to the viewer, unless she/he added them, like ‘brazil’, ‘niterol’ and ‘dani’. Was the picture taken in Brazil? Who is Dani, if it is a name?

These two examples and many others in the flickr website(i.e http://www.flickr.com/photos/sigraswhippets/290384425/, http://www.flickr.com/photos/karenilagan/2085846406/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/waitingforsophie/3867733670/ portray a shift in the paradigm of family albums. This is not to say that the ‘traditional’ pictures of holiday snaps, birthdays and other important days are not available in Flickr. However, digital photography and the Internet have pushed photography’s limits making it unlimited, in the sense of picture taking, as today you can make a snapshot almost anywhere. Moreover, the users of Flickr do not simply take pictures, but they perform, either by uploading their images, or by commenting on the work of others. They look and at the same time they want to be looked at in order to preserve this game, which makes Flickr ‘survive’ as a social network. And it is not the images that sustain the interest of the users, but language, which comes as a reward and praise for the ‘value’ of their photography.

In this paper we looked into the social network website of Flickr and took as a case study family pictures. The reason for this was that because of the digital revolution and the Internet it is easier than ever before to take pictures and share them not only with our close friends and family, but also with the world. Even if the pictures are very personal and belong to the private sphere, they are now disseminated through the usage of social networks in a rather exhibitionist way. We noted that the users’ relationship to the image is not only a passive act, a restricted scopophilia, but also her/his role is active through language (and of course by submitting/uploading pictures). To paraphrase Guy Debord, Flickr ‘is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated through images’ (Debord 1967:12). For the Flickr user the content of this website has become their Weltanschauung and their reason d’être in relation to the activity of taking pictures.