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.

Distorted Beauty

click on the link for details: http://demo.fb.se/e/girlpower/retouch/retouch/

Manipulation of photographs is certainly not something new. Actually, it is interrelated with the medium of photography since its advent. There are many examples to certify this fact throughout history and in almost all cultural spheres where photography is being used, from fashion, paparazzi, advertising, photojournalism, documentary, and political campaigns; Stalin erased those he  considered as his opponents, Musolini airbrushed his horse handler, National Geographic moved the pyramid of Giza, Time Magazine darkened the skin of OJ Simpson, Paris Match removed Sarkozy's body fat while he was canoeing, Microsoft replaced the black man in their Polish campaign...the list is endless...

It seems that we have reached the point where photography is neither a window nor a mirror of our societies. Photography at large (yes, there are exceptions of course) is used to create a parallel universe of the real. It enforces a beautification not towards a perfect world, but rather an unreal dimension. Digital manipulation has certainly undermined photography's indexicality and as Fred Ritchin put it: '...much of the photographic process will occur after the shutter is released. The photograph becomes the initial research, an image draft, as vulnerable to modification as it has always been to recontextualisation' (Ritchin, 2009: p.34).

The picture above is 14 year old Lynn. She was used as part of a 2005 campaign in Sweden (the initiative was taken by the Swedish Ministry of Health and Social Affairs) to raise awareness about how magazines tend to create a socially constructed beautification. The campaign shows Lynn in twelve 'before' and 'after', gradual stages, where in each one something looking or being 'imperfect' has been altered to look not only 'faultless', but also seductive. But are women with big round breasts, fuller lips, diamond blue eyes and chalk white teeth more desirable? The answer goes beyond a quick 'yes' or 'no' and has rather to do with an ideological, psychological and physical oppression mediated by the be-holders of an unreal female Image which eventually has liquified itself and has become the social Real.

The ongoing effort of the fashion industry (photographers, designers, stylists, beauty product companies) to construct, homogenise and globalise photoshoped beauty (see relative debates about Asian and African discourses on looking 'European') apart from being repulsive, at the same time is sexist, racist and socially dangerous. Recently, my flatmate's sister went for an interview at an airline company that was recruiting air hostesses. She was not taken for the job, not because of any lack of qualifications, but rather because she 'should first lose weight on her behind' as the lady-employer told her. This example portrays the qualities, ethics and values that we hold in our modern societies; the employees capitalist evaluation of a candidate has not only to do with labour per se, but it will include a surplus product, which is the candidates image, something which will also be visually consumed by the customers.

Moreover and to conclude, it is worth mentioning that there are many websites offering digital retouching services, such as http://www.nyphotographics.com/retouching/index2.htm and http://www.professionalretouch.com/.  The later, states on its homepage that you can 'specify the changes you want' 'Change the background, improve lighting, remove skin imperfections and blemishes, whiten teeth, make eyes shine, and repair of damaged images. Or - just make me pretty!' In any case it seems that from Kodak's slogan 'You press the button, we do the rest' (i.e we  process and develop your film) we have shifted to a 'You press the button, we make you pretty'. But what does 'pretty' mean anyway? The comments are yours...