Traces: Photographic Negatives and the Quest for Truth

Abstract

Machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence have made photographic manipulation easy and seamless. In thinking about the ways in which artificial intelligence has altered the truth-value of photography, this article explores the importance of situating the current debates over fake news and photographic manipulation in a larger historical context. More specifically, it suggests that it is equally important to understand both the inner workings of artificial intelligence as well as the foundations of indexicality that warrant the truth-value of both analog film and video. In the era of analog flexible film then, the negative was often seen as a source of truth, whereas the positive was understood as being manipulatable and manipulated. In the age of digital photography, the idea of a digital negative has come to articulate yet another attempt to anchor the visual in a regime of truth. RAW formats are now seen as comparable to an analog negative. These RAW formats are developed in an Adobe software application called Lightroom rather than in a physical darkroom which facilitated the making of an analog positive image out of an analog negative. The article concludes with an appeal for the importance of teaching both current and obsolete methods of media making in order to foster critical visual literacy and argues that the darkroom has become yet again a crucial place for rediscovering the power of photography to expose both its authenticity and its malleability.

Keywords:

• Photography
• Darkroom
• Truth
• Manipulation

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images: Your Pictures Are Looking at You,” Architectural Design 89 (2019): 22.

2 Harun Faroki, “Phantom Images,” Public 29 (2004): 21.

3 Tony Crowley, “Keywords: Post-Truth,” Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism 15 (2017): 92.

4 John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 7.

5 W.J.T. Mitchell, “The Pictorial Turn,” ArtForum (March 1992): 89.

6 Mitra Azar, Geoff Cox, and Leonardo Impett, “Introduction: Ways of Machine Seeing,” AI & Society 36 (2021): 1093.

7 Alan Trachtenberg, “Photography and Social Knowledge,” American Art 29, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 6.

8 Ibid., 8.

9 Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 44.

10 Ibid., 44.

11 Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 8.

12 Ibid., 11.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Dominique Francois Arago, “Report,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leetes Island Books, 1981), 17.

16 Carol Armstrong, Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–1875 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 138.

17 Ibid., 144.

18 Ibid., 143.

19 Sarah Kennel, In the Darkroom: An Illustrated Guide to Photographic Processes before the Digital Age (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009), 3.

20 Liz Wells, Photography: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 1997), 34.

21 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 6.

22 Ibid., 78.

23 Mia Fineman, Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012), 3.

24 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Image,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark Hansen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 38.

25 Donna Schwartz, “Professional Oversight: Policing the Credibility of Photojournalism,” in Image Ethics in the Digital Age, ed. Larry Gross, John Stuart Katz, and Jay Ruby (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 33.

26 Kennel, In the Darkroom, 43.

27 Martin Parr and Michel Campeau, “The Darkroom RIP,” Aperture 188 (Fall 2007): 56.

28 Azar, Cox, and Impett, “Introduction: Ways of Machine Seeing,” 1093.

29 Marika Sturken, “Advertising and the Rise of Amateur Photography: From Kodak and Polaroid to the Digital Image,” Advertising & Society Quarterly 18, no. 3 (2017).

30 Michael Barthel, A. Mitchel, and J. Holcomb, “Many Americans Believe Fake News Is Sowing Confusion,” Pew Research Center, December 15, 2016.

31 Schwartz, “Professional Oversight,” 33.

32 Hany Farid, “Digital Forensics: 5 Ways to Spot a Fake Photo,” Scientific American, June 2, 2008.

33 Stan Horaczek, “Spot Faked Photos Using Digital Forensic Techniques,” Popular Science, July 21, 2017.

34 Asko Lehmuskallio, Jukka Hakkinen, and Janne Seppanen, “Photorealistic Computer-Generated Images Are Difficult to Distinguish from Digital Photographs: A Case Study with Professional Photographers and Photo-Editors,” Visual Communication 18, no. 4 (November 2019): 44.

35 Brig. Gen. R. Patrick Huston and Lt. Col. M. Eric Bahm, “Deepfakes 2.0: The New Era of ‘Truth Decay’,” Just Security, April 14, 2020.

36 Meredith Somers, “Deepfakes, Explained,” MIT, July 21, 2020.

37 Mitra Azar, “Algorithmic Facial Image: Regimes of Truth and Datafication,” A Peer-Reviewed Journal About APRJA 7, no. 1 (2018): 7.

38 Paglen, “Invisible Images,” 22.

39 S. Takumu, “Face Spoofing Detection Using Disentangled Representation Learning,” AI-Scholar, August 2, 2021.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stefka Hristova

STEFKA HRISTOVA is an Associate Professor of Digital Media at Michigan Technological University. She holds a PhD in Visual Studies with emphasis on Critical Theory from the University of California, Irvine. Her research analyzes digital and algorithmic visual culture. Hristova’s work has been published in journals such as Transnational Subjects Journal, Visual Anthropology, Radical History Review, TripleC, Surveillance and Security, Media and Communication, and others. She was an NEH Summer Scholar for the “Material Maps in the Digital Age” seminar in 2019, and a PI for the Michigan Humanities Grant “Bad Info: Fake News, Manipulated Photographs, and Social Influencers” (2021–2022). She is the lead editor of Algorithmic Culture: How Big Data and Artificial Intelligence Are Transforming Everyday Life (Lexington Books, 2021) and the author of Proto-Algorithmic War: How the Iraq War Became a Laboratory for Algorithmic Logics (Palgrave, 2022). Email: [email protected]