* * Too many pictures, too little truth

I’m often complimented on my amazing wildlife photography, especially my bird shots. Here’s the thing, though, they’re not mine. They’re my dad’s. He’s the guy who spends his free, healthy time on the river, shooting the birds (so to speak).

Dad has told me that digital photography has totally revolutionized his efforts. In the old days of film cameras, he’d bring a couple of rolls of 36 exposures, take 72 photos, rush them to the developer (He’s never been the model of patience.) and hope he got some good ones. Now he takes a couple of memory cards and might take 600 to 800 photos and keep 6 or 8. When you go on these expeditions frequently, even those 6 or 8 begin to add up over time.

So complete has been the switch from film to digital that film is practically non-existent any more, relegated to the dust-bin of history. Thirty-five millimeter film is as rare as vinyl records and once-expensive film cameras are now found mostly in antique and thrift stores.

The technology that transitioned from film to digital hasn’t stopped. Now there are roughly 2 billion smart devices (phones, IPads, etc.) with camera capabilities. If every one of them took only three photos a day, the world would be accumulating 6 billion photos a day, over 2 trillion a year. My guess is that we’re taking lots more photos and looking at them lots less than ever before. In addition to that, the software tools for manipulating the individual pixels that now comprise a photo are cheap and ubiquitous; we can make any photo look like almost anything we want. Nothing we see in a photo today should ever be trusted as real.

All this brings forward the disquieting question of what a photo really is.

One of the most important and famous photographers of all time was Matthew Brady. Often referred to as the father of photojournalism, Brady (born May 18, 1822, died February 15, 1896) brought the horrors of the Civil War with his newly developed daguerreotype technique to vast audiences who had never before seen or envisioned such carnage. As a means of documenting the procession of the human experience, photography was unsurpassed in importance. That era is over. When was the last time you saw a photo that you long remembered? Did it have a believable realism to it, or was it the product of a Photoshop, Lightroom, or Google Nik technician’s hand? When you see a photo of an important event, do you have an expectation it is legitimate?

I recently saw a magnificent photo on-line that appeared to be taken of earth from space. It was titled “Earth in her cradle of clouds – via the Hubble Telescope,” and it had a fabulous, almost hand-like envelope of thick, high clouds around it. Problem is that it wasn’t really of earth and it wasn’t taken by the Hubble Telescope. It was a computer-developed 3D rendering. The magnificent images that WERE taken by the Hubble are likely to be disbelieved by all who see them. The more fabulous they look, the more likely we are to disbelieve them.

Think about the great, iconic photos of human history and how you might react to them now. Remember the lone protester in China, standing in front of the line of armored tanks? If you saw it today, would you believe it? Remember the four soldiers lifting the flagpole on Iwo Jima? Could it have been Photoshopped? Remember the naked, terrified 9-year old Vietnamese girl, running with other children down the street, fleeing a napalm attack on her village? It changed the US resolve in that war and hastened our withdrawal and eventual defeat, but only because there was no doubt in our eyes that it was real. Would it have had the same impact if its credibility had been as uncertain as the credibility of every photo we see today?

So what is a picture if it is no longer a true, visual representation of a moment in history? What if photography and art are now indistinguishable? If nothing we see henceforth can ever be believed as real, is it still valuable? And if so, for what? And if not, will we continue to take all those trillions of pictures?

As I type this essay, the television is on. I see commercials that are entirely, 100% computer generated, figments of the designer’s imagination. Could it be that within a decade, photography will become to all of us like an addict in a room filled with cocaine, far too much of a good thing to still be good? In the perfection of a technology still new in human evolutionary terms, we may have indeed killed it.