Afterlight on Andromeda
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
Athabasca Glacier below Mount Andromeda, Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada.
(click image to enlarge)
Working with this photo upset my smug convictions about photography and Photoshop, to the point where I’m no longer sure what is legitimate and what isn’t.
What is real and what is illusion? That has been a frequent, fertile theme in fiction, film, theatre and philosophy, but for the most part photography seldom lent itself, transparently or otherwise, to such a question. Then along came John and Thomas Knoll, and now many a too-good image provokes the skeptical “yes, but has it been Photoshopped?”
That digital editing software had turned photography from a reliable witness into an untrustworthy, potentially perjurious one was a lament which I used to consider misinformed and misplaced. While photography usually told the truth, never was it necessarily the whole truth or nothing but the truth. A scene of apparent pristine wilderness could be framed to exclude an adjacent clearcut or dump, and every ski photographer knows to steepen slopes with a slight tilt of the camera, to give just the simplest of examples.
