Bazin writes that “the objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making” (13). Barthes seems to assign the same value of credibility to the photograph. These statements got me thinking about whether the photograph in the digital age can still be perceived as a credible source. Photographs have always been able to be manipulated through optical effects, but the advent of digital photography and image editing programs like photoshop have made it much easier to profoundly alter images. It’s usually easy to tell that a photo is false when the Photoshop work is done poorly, but with enough time and skill, a person can create a fake image that looks totally believable. Furthermore, the rapid advance of computer graphics can blur the line between the artificial and the real. Taken side by a side, a good CG render of an object might be indistinguishable from an actual photograph of the same object. For example, look at the below images. Without reading the text at the top, see if you can determine which one is CG and which one is a digital photograph.
The practice of computer graphic is often obsessed with realism, analyzing objects down to minute texture details and interactions with light. Bazin argues that photography has liberated painting from the confines of realism, but this cannot be applied to the relatively new art of CG which has gone in the opposite direction. As game designers and computer scientists continue to develop new computational models to render photorealistic worlds, the line between the real and the fabricated will become even more pervasive.
Since digital technology can be (and is often) used to undermine the association between photography and the real, can we still say that photograph is “credible”? Or must we instead develop a kind of “paranoid” relation to the photographic image, insure of its truth and thus questioning of its authenticity?
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