“A picture is worth a thousand words.”
Although academics should prefer to read a thousand words above just looking at an image to draw conclusions, there might still be some truth in the above mentioned phrase. In most cases, imagery is very powerful to send a message across or convey emotions to the viewer. It is therefore not strange that it has become an essential part of the internet.
Because images are such a vital thing in the digital world, there is also a tendency to alter existing images. In our digital era, this has been made possible due to the emergence of digital image manipulation. Nowadays, anyone who has a computer with image editing software installed on it can go ahead and alter any image that they want.
The practice of digital photo manipulation is not a recent phenomenon. Already in 1982, National Geographic digitally altered a photograph of the Pyramids of Giza, which was used on the front page of one of their editions. Out of aesthetic purposes, the two pyramids were placed closer to each other than they were on the original photograph, resulting in an image that better fitted the size of the front page. Although the alteration might not have had far-reaching complications, it still alarmed scientists. For example in 1994, Christopher Anderson wrote an article in Science in which he referred to the incident and warned for the greater implications of digitally manipulated images in the scientific field.
For my own field of interest, digital photo manipulation can be used as a tool to drastically improve the quality of historical photographs. It even makes it possible to fully colourise historical photographs of which the original version is in black-and-white. This technique has reached a level in which there are algorithms out there that can do this without any human interference. Websites like Algorithmia or ColouriseSG offer the opportunity to upload a grey scaled photograph and turn it into a vivid colourised image. Although these services are not perfect, it can still be a fun tool to make your old photographs feel more alive. It is important to stress that the goal of these services is to create plausible colours, it is possible that these do not always match the actual colours in real life.
Instead of this only being a fun thing to do, colorizing photographs can also improve our understanding of and our relationship to history. An example of this is the project Faces of Auschwitz, where the black-and-white photographs of prisoners in the concentration camp are being colorized. As dr. Waitman Wade Beorn explains in the video below, this can improve our relationship to history.
As photo alteration can enhance our experience of history, it can also distort our understanding of history, as it opens the door for other kinds of alterations. To catch a glimpse of the possibilities, just take a look at the work of Jane Long, an artist who not only colorized historical photographs and improved their quality, but also transformed the photographs into surreal images where many new elements are added. Because of the surreal context, and also because the artist showcases the original images, it is not hard to spot that alterations have been made. However, it indicates how photographs can be enhanced in a way that they are taken out of context. The work of Jane Long is an innocent playing around with this, but you can imagine there are instances where alteration of historical photographs can really become a problem.
It is then important that with every manipulation, we are aware that an alteration has been made and we also know the content of the alteration. But how do we do this? As Anderson already argued in 1994, it is important that we safeguard the original. In this way, we can compare the image with the original historical photograph and thereby conclude which alterations have been made. The above mentioned projects are great examples of this, as they show both versions of the images.
Of course, this only works when we know that an image has been digitally altered. Otherwise, trying to gather information about the origin of the picture might still be an option, for example doing a Google reverse image search, but this will not always suffice. Fortunately, some research has been done into techniques that are able to spot alterations to an image without the need for the original image. A research paper from scientists of the Tokyo Denki University highlights the use of a technique based on ‘Reversible Histogram Shift’, that as the paper shows leads to interesting results. And just this year, an article was published that proposed a technique to detect digitally colorized images based on ‘Convolutional Neural Networks’ (CNN).
It is easy to blame the techniques of digital image manipulation for possible complications, but in the end (like with all technologies) it are humans who decide how the techniques are being used. As I have tried to show in this piece, digital photo manipulation is not necessarily a bad thing. However, in times of fake news, deep fakes and whatnot, we have to be constantly aware that the images we see online might be tempered with and we should know how to adress this.
Bibliography
- Bronx Documentary Center, Pyramids of Giza, Egypt February 1982 Photo by Gordon Hagan <http://www.alteredimagesbdc.org/national-geographic >.
- Christopher Anderson, ‘Easy-to-alter digital images raise fears of tampering’, Science 263 (1994) 317-318.
- Yuki Obara, Yusuke Niwa and Shigeo Wada, ‘Detection and Identification of Image Manipulation Based on Reversible Histogram Shift’, Electronics and Communications in Japan 100:9 (2017) 13-22.
- Weize Quan, Dong-Ming Yan, Kai Wang, Xiaopeng Zhang and Denis Pellerin, Detecting Colorized Images via Convolutional Neural Networks: Toward High Accuracy and Good Generalization (2019).
- The original black-and-white photograph: A. van Vliet, ‘De Senaat’ (1949, online image) <https://www.erfgoedleiden.nl/collecties/beeldmateriaal/zoeken-in-beeldmateriaal/detail/b3326600-26bc-11e3-afc9-3cd92befe4f8/media/1f2f1b12-6ffc-0bb7-669f-5974cd749667>.
I personally think we should be highly careful with the manipulation of (historical) photos. I believe that interpretation always plays a role in coloring a black-and-white photo. Therefore, there is a chance you are mutating a source in the wrong way (not intended by the creator). Do you think that digital photo manipulation can be more seen as a form of art?
Thank you for your comment! I agree with you, we have to be careful with manipulation, even coloring a black-and-white photograph is in the end a form of photo manipulation. I think it is a very interesting question if photo manipulation should be seen as more of a form of art. It might be, as there is an artistic side to it. As the original images don’t tell us the real colors, in a lot of colorized photographs there is a need for interpretation by the artist. This does not mean that it can’t be historical accurate however. It is then the responsibility of the artist to research what colors are most likely, and transparency about this process is important towards the viewer.
I can remember asking my parents when color was invented, because all of the pictures from when they were young and the movies that remembered them of their childhoods were in black and white. I used to believe the world had been without color up until relatively shortly before I was born. Though the colorless past seemed so distant from mine. It was hard for me to relate to them, because my world was so colorful. I guess many people might still feel similarly somewhere deep down. That’s why I think colorization could be a useful tool in humanizing the past, by making it more relatable.
Nevertheless, there is a danger to it. Interpretation comes with the risk of distorting information. But I reckon this means we should be just as critical of images as we are of texts.