Visura Blog

    
Reframe | Fred Ritchin & the Post-Photographic Challenge, Part II
Location: Brooklyn
Biography: The Visura (Vē-su-ra: Be seen) Blog features Visura highlights, essays, and announcements including grants, partnerships, events, and open call opportunities and results.
News Spotlight
Reframe | Fred Ritchin & the Post-Photographic Challenge, Part II
written by clary estes for the visura media blog
Apr 10, 2019
Editor's Note: For the second installment of this multi-part series, writer Clary Estes examines with Fred Ritchin some of the subsequent events in the history of the digital photojournalism industry that he predicted in the early 80s. We explore Ritchin’s first foray into the discussion of image manipulation, and how liberties taken early on by publishers not only affected Ritchin’s trajectory as a philosopher of the industry but also prompted some of the problematic situations visual storytelling and photojournalism in media is coping with today. 

PART I / PART II PART III



History repeats itself: The problem of the misrepresentation of the image. 




My interest is not really in what is the future of photography.  
My interest is in what is the future of the world, 
and the future of the planet, and the future of life, 

and how photography fits in to ameliorate it...
to make it better. 
Fred Ritchin, 2011


A prolific author, Fred Ritchin has published three books on the future of imaging: In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography (Aperture, 1990); After Photography (W. W. Norton, 2008); and Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen (Aperture, 2013). In 2016, he co-authored with Carole Naggar the Magnum Photobook: The Catalogue Raisonné. Over the course of these books, numerous articles, including his most recent published in ZEKE Magazine titled, “Image in the Era of Post-Truth,” and countless presentations—Ritchin continues to identify and discuss the storytelling potential and implications of these old and new technologies, as well as the first ethical liberties with regard to photo manipulation taken early on. 

In 1982, for example, National Geographic digitally moved one of the pyramids of Giza to fit their cover, setting the photojournalism industry on an almost novelistic, yet strangely predictable path towards creating an environment of social distrust of the photographic image.

Fred recalls: “When the editor at National Geographic told me that all they were doing, in his opinion, was going back in time to move the photographer a few feet to one side to get another perspective, I thought it was extraordinary. I called him back and I said, ‘Did you really say that?’ And he said, ‘yes.’ And to me, that was science fiction at the time. So I thought, if I wrote about this, people would respond and they would say, ‘Gee, we don't want to lose credibility of the photographic medium by all this malleability so we should create some kind of labeling system.'" 

"But I was kind of shocked", Fred explains, "I received only three letters to the editor in response to my article published in the New York Times Magazine; one was from a literary agent asking to represent me, and one was from four older guys who canceled their subscriptions to National Geographic over what I'd written about, but there was little response from people in photojournalism.” 

Ritchin goes on to point out later instances of photo manipulation that were much more insidious like the June 1994 Time cover of OJ Simpson’s altered image mug shot upon his arrest. For the cover, his skin was darkened and a vignette was added. This early example of photo manipulation called into question Time’s objectivity, as well as led many readers to accuse the magazine of racism. 

In retrospect, Fred Ritchin has used these examples to show how photo manipulation has the ability to perpetuate exoticism and racial bias. He recognizes how these issues are far from resolved and continue to be a problem in the industry today. These concerns transcend beyond the act of manipulating an image within the frame to the actual representation or lack thereof in storytelling. 

It is not that digital photo manipulation exists that is the problem, it is the obscuring of context that denies audiences the full story.


Ritchin feels that the photojournalism industry still does not think enough about the problematic ocean we are sailing through when it comes to representation. The concern now, he notes, is what still can be done to restore credibility.

When trying to address the problem of representation, Ritchin emphasizes the need for appropriate context. According to Ritchin, it is not that digital photo manipulation exists that is the problem, it is the obscuring of the conditions in which the image was made that denies audiences the full story.

“I was never against manipulation. I just thought the reader needs to be informed as to what he or she is looking at. I began to think, as John Berger suggested, that a documentary photograph should be treated as a quotation from appearances and just like in writing, you can't change what is within a quote if you're putting quotation marks around it. So the photographic frame to me indicated a quotation”...

He continues to explain: "And after a while I was called a 19th-century moralist and various things and I remember going to a meeting of photographers and somebody had said that he'd photographed models on top of buildings in New York City, some in high winds, and when he showed the book dummy to friends they said, ‘You're really good with Photoshop,” because they wouldn't believe that they actually would do something so dangerous as that. So I thought, people would really want to preserve the goose that lays the golden egg. You don't want to kill it, but few really cared with the exception of the NPPA.”


For decades, Fred Ritchin has attempted to address and promote the responsible use of photo manipulation in publications.



Ritchin’s early attempt to address and promote the responsible use of photo manipulation in publications was his “not-a-lens” icon, which he developed in 1994. It was a small icon of a square encompassing a circle that was either slashed out or not to designate whether an image had been manipulated. Added to the bottom of a photograph, the icon served to signify when an image adhered to conventional lens-image standards.  

“...there were some organizations that adopted the icon, like ASMP and the magazine Airone in Italy. It was much discussed in the media, but the “not-a-lens” icon never really caught on in a big way.” Ritchin explains. Why the icon never caught on is up for debate. 

Comparatively, these days social media has organically created the #nofilter for, more specifically Instagram, images that have not undergone any form of toning or manipulation by users who upload to the social media platform. Ironically, even the use of this hashtag is met with skepticism by audiences ( ex. NOFILTER: A philosophical reflections on photography in the age of Instagram by Daniel Star, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. 


...we cannot forget our soul for the sake of new tools and easy outs.

 

The crux of the conversation that is so important to Ritchin is that with all of the opportunities of digital photography, we cannot forget our soul for the sake of new tools and easy outs. Tiny missteps unreflected upon can become cavernous barriers to aspiring photographers, visual storytellers, and complacent industry leaders and organizations. 

The greatest aspect of journalism is the fact that it is a perpetual process of fact-finding and analysis, reanalysis and dissemination with the intent to inform and, we hope, improve the world.

Fred Ritchin is far from forgetting or letting up on the problem of the misrepresentation of the photojournalistic image. He encourages media leaders, content creators and publishers to not forget the importance of continuing to examine and discuss the infrastructure and dynamics of the photojournalism industry, as well as how new systems and technologies used to publish and distribute visual media affect storytelling. 

Ritchin has spent his career writing about the potentials and challenges of digital photography. He has also actively worked to identify and develop tools to pull the wool away from audiences eyes while simultaneously working to propel visual storytelling as a medium not just to convey information, but act as a catalyst for positive social change. 

Let’s face it. It’s no surprise but we can fix this. 

Written by Clary Estes
Editor: Adriana Teresa Letorney
Published on March 22, 2019


In Part 3, we introduce Fred Ritchin's Four Corners Project, an initiative to increase authorship and credibility in visual media. The project introduces a tool that allows specific information to be embedded in each of the photograph's four corners. 


BACK  NEXT



Fred Ritchin & the Post-Photographic Challenge by The Visura Media Blog via Visura
Editor's Note: For the first installment of this multi-part series, writer Clary Estes sat down with educator,   author & Dean Emeritus of the International Center of Photography (ICP) School Fred Ritchin to discuss his vision,...
LinkedIn Icon Facebook Icon Twitter Icon
5,717

Also by Visura Blog —

Spotlight

Visura: Rashod Taylor on Documenting the Intimate Realities of Family, Legacy, and the Lens

Cameron Peters for Visura
Featured Film Videos

Video: Johanna Alarcón on the power of Photography

Directed by Adriana Teresa Letorney for Visura
Featured Film News Reframe Videos

VIDEO: Sara Hylton on the importance of stories that capture strength, resilience and beauty

The Visura Media Blog
Events

HOWARD GREENBERG GALLERY PRESENTS SAUL LEITER: CENTENNIAL

Visura Blog
Events News

SFMOMA: Sea Change: Photographs from the Collection

Visura Blog
Events

Whitney Museum of American Art presents Trust Me

Visura Blog
Events News

The Colombus Museum of Art presents Arbus • Sherman • Woodman: American Photography from the 1960s and 1970s

Visura Blog
Events News

11th annual New York Portfolio Review

Visura Blog
Events News

The Brooklyn Museum Presents María Magdalena Campos - Pons: Behold , the Artist’s First Museum Survey in New York

Visura Blog
Events News

TATE MODERN: A celebration of the varied landscape of contemporary African photography today

Visura Blog
Media

Visura interviews photographer Thong Vo

Kisha Ravi for Visura
Events News

Eastman Museum Presents Gillian Laub's Southern Rites

Kisha Ravi for Visura Blog
Events News

40th Annual ICP Infinity Awards Benefit Gala to be Held April 10 in New York City

Visura Blog
Events News

New Mexico Museum of Art presents— Manuel Carrillo: Mexican Modernist

Kisha Ravi for Visura Blog
Books Featured Film

Delpire & Co presents Karla Voleau's new book

Kisha Ravi for Visura Blog
Events News

Gagosian presents Seeing Is Believing: Lee Miller and Friends

Visura Blog
Events News

MoMA Presents: ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN

Kisha Ravi for Visura Blog
Events

The Contemporary Jewish Museum Presents— RetroBlakesberg: The Music Never Stopped

Kisha Ravi for Visura Blog
Events News

Artistic Freedom Initiative (AFI) presents Beautiful Forms: Queer Art Unbound festival

Kisha Ravi for Visura Blog
Events News

Smithsonian American Art Museum presents Carrie Mae Weems: Looking Forward, Looking Back

Kisha Ravi for Visura Blog
Events News

Peabody Essex Museum presents As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic

Kisha Ravi for Visura Blog
Events News

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) exhibits Cy Twombly's work

Kisha Ravi for Visura Blog
Events

Art Gallery of Ontario Presents a Re-Imagination of African Studio Portraiture

Kisha Ravi for Visura Blog
Events News

Fox Talbot Museum presents Light Struck by Ellen Carey

Kisha Ravi for Visura Blog
Reframe | Fred Ritchin & the Post-Photographic Challenge, Part II by Written by Clary Estes for The Visura Media Blog
Sign-up for
For more access