Fauxtography
[Note: I thought I was quite clever in coming up with the title of this week’s offering. Then I did a bit of research and found that it has been in use since 2006 to describe using digitally altered images to intentionally fool people. Oh well!]
The first photograph with a permanent image was produced by Joseph Niepce in 1827. The exposure time was several hours, taken out of his studio window in Paris. Since that day, trillions of photographs have been created. In fact more photos are taken every second today than all of the photographs taken in the 19th Century.
During most of the 20th Century images captured on film were considered truthful representations of moments in time, telling a story that, if necessary, could be used as evidence in a court of law. Of course there were ways of manipulating prints made from negatives, but at that point it was relatively simple to decipher when something had been altered. Joseph Stalin was famous for having his official photographers go back into the darkroom and remove those who he no longer felt were trustworthy. In fact many of those who were erased photographically were also disappeared from all records and from life itself.
As noted, photographs were items a person could rely on to convey a sense of a real and un-doctored perspective. But over the past 35 years, in particular with the advent of the digital age, that has changed drastically to the point where today, any image should be suspect with regard to its veracity. In the early 1990s I was introduced to the abilities of a computer called a Scitex machine. We were at a printing company in Hong Kong where the technician showed us how to alter the color of someone’s eyes or even exchange people’s heads from one to the other. It was a powerful tool for a printer and cost was well over a million dollars. Today anyone can do the same thing and lots more simply using software in their smart phone.
The problem is that most people tend to continue to believe that what they see in a photo is the Truth, that it is a representation of an actual fact, whereas in reality, most photographs we see to today have been altered. Sometimes it’s just removing an unwanted bit of garbage on the ground using Adobe's Photoshop. But more often, the image will present a completely concocted scenario placing someone in an unflattering situation.
The increasing use of extraordinary Artificial Intelligence (AI) software is making photographic manipulation of this type even easier. All anyone has to do at this point is suggest a scene by using one of the many AI applications such as Chat GPT to formulate a very real but imaginary setting. This can be done using either still images or with video, giving the produced piece even greater credibility. In 2019, researchers at MIT produced a Deep Fake video of Richard Nixon giving a speech that had been prepared for him in case of an Apollo 11 fatal disaster. He never gave that speech, yet here it is, recreated and next to impossible to tell that it is a deep fake.
In the last 6 years the technology has transitioned into a fine-tuned tool that is accessible to everyone, [it took me less than two minutes to create the image of Trump shaking hands with George Washington]. Deep fakes and manipulated photographs have appeared hundreds of thousands of times, and in some cases, they have done egregious harm to reputations, just as they were intended to do, because people continue to believe them to be real.
I mention all of this because, as everyone is aware, we have entered the era of the use of outright lying as a weapon. Many times the falsehoods we hear are supposedly corroborated by fabricated “facts” along with manipulated images, then offered to the public in online forums. People search for this kind of specific information to verify a preconceived notion. In other words, many people want to believe these lies to be true regardless of irrefutable proof to the contrary.
We see this in the proliferation of Conspiracy Theories, where believers offer evidence of their perspective by telling someone they read about it on the internet. Q-Anon adherents love to say to the non-believer, “Do the research!” What this means is that if we type into a search engine the details of their narrative, we will also find the same false information they have used to shore up their own perspective, thus supposedly proving their point.
To counter this flood of misinformation, myriad articles have been written about how to recognize these misleading and outright untrue stories and images. The problem is that we all want to believe the things that fit with our personal perspective and so we are prejudiced in favor of the information we want to believe, even if it’s not true.
For me, the only way to combat this constant barrage of misinformation is to remain steadfast and Mindful that anything we read or see in the news or online may have been manipulated in some fashion with the intent of influencing our point of view. There is no doubt that parsing truth from fiction is difficult work. I become very weary of this constant vigilance, but I’m not sure if I know of a good alternative other than completely shutting off the outside world.
And so, unfortunately, the discovery of the photographic process helped us document history both at home and abroad but has been turned on its head. What allowed future generations to see what came before has been weaponized and the hard visual facts we came to rely on are being reinvented to fit whatever current regime wants us to see. This is much like in George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, where the protagonist, Winston Smith, has the job of rewriting history to fit the current political climate.
Apparently, we are now on the verge of living Mr. Orwell’s nightmare where fiction becomes fact and the information we hear may be nothing more than propaganda.
So please stay wary, do some actual research, and question everything.
Good thumbnail sketch of the beginning of photography and some of the advances/regressions over the arc of time to the present.
As to the absurd image of our charlatan-entertainer President shaking hands with Washington, Washington died in 1799. And your point is that not every American would bother to know that. Seeing is believing nearly every time, – no different than for our ancestors on the African veldt.