If Waldo Richardson only knew what the paparazzi were up to these days, he'd be, well, spinning in his darkroom. Waldo, who lived all his 90-plus years a few creeks over from where I grew up, was an early-20th century optimist enamored with the high technology of his day--steam engines, magnetos, and the like. In particular, he was fascinated with photography, and from about 1900 to 1910 he made a living chronicling life as it was in our Ozark hills. Among my few prizes, in fact, is a collection of Waldo's 4x5-inch glass negatives which he gave me shortly before he died. Even with the boxy, mahogany-and-brass view camera and Sears and Roebuck mail-order chemicals he used, the images are sharp and the contrasts stunning. From Fourth-of-July picnics and the Florence German Marching Band to steam engines and the Self Chapel baseball team, Waldo captured a true history of life tucked away in the slipstream of time.
When examining old glass negatives like these, you know that what you see is what you had--real people living real lives--because, as the saying goes, photographs don't lie. But for better or worse, digital technology has changed all that. From the malicious manipulation of O.J. Simpson's mug shot on the cover of Time magazine to the marvelous subtlety of the movie Forrest Gump, photographs don't necessarily tell the truth anymore.
Of course, there's nothing new about photo manipulation. Since Eastman's first snapshot of Kodak, photographers have manipulated images using light and shadow in both the field and the darkroom. But today's photographers--including Michael Carr, who takes the photos you see on the cover of DDJ--spend more time peering at computer monitors than squinting through viewfinders.
This goes to the heart of the biggest difference between today's digital manipulation and yesteryear's cut-and-paste photo fraud--you just can't tell the difference anymore. (You didn't really think that legless Vietnam vet in Forrest Gump was a real-life double amputee, did you?) As movie producer Steve Starkey recently said, "We're finding that digital technology's great breakthrough isn't in mind-boggling effects, but in its ability to heighten the drama of a scene in very subtle ways."
It's one thing to get lost in the fantasy of a movie theater or annoyed by spin doctoring of news magazines. It is quite another, however, when digital-image manipulation threatens the foundations of basic research. In laboratories which rely upon scientific images for evaluation and approval, computer photography is old hat, as scientists routinely use it to record everything from cell counts to molecular structures. Consequently, says Mt. Sinai School of Medicine's Paul Anderson in Science magazine, "the opportunity for adjusting the photographic representation to fit the hypothesis" is always there.
There are proposals to combat unethical and/or illegal doctoring of digital data. In systems devised by JPL researcher Gary Friedman, image-verification cameras use the NIST's DSS and RSA Data Security's BSAFE or TIPEM public-key authentication software to verify that an image hasn't been tampered with. Other approaches involve time/date stamping using similar algorithms.
Still, researchers like Friedman see the courtroom as the real battleground for digital-imagery authenticity. The day a lawyer challenges the truthfulness of a photograph introduced as evidence is, without a doubt, upon us. The intelligence-gathering community has already run head-on into this palaver. In a U.N. debate over whether the U.S. justifiably shot down a Libyan fighter, U.S. diplomats offered photos taken from the U.S. plane's video system that clearly showed missiles under the Libyan's wings. Libyan countered that the photos had been manipulated--and the U.S. couldn't prove otherwise.
Ultimately, we're again faced with the double-edged sword of technological progress--it can make our life better, or diminish it. As for images and photographs, we'll simply stop believing what we see. If this forces us to question more and accept less, so much the better. But if the cost is a society which is perpetually suspicious and hardened by skepticism, you have to hope progress is worth it.
Then again, digital-image manipulation would let us see what Jeff Duntemann would look like with a slicked-backed pompadour, or Swaine with a shave and flat-top. And, if the truth were known, I wouldn't mind shedding 10 pounds. Maybe there's something to this technology stuff after all.
editor-in-chief
Copyright © 1994, Dr. Dobb's Journal