A Photographer's Pencil: The Tucson Shootings

In On Photography, Susan Sontag quotes Fox Talbot, a photographic innovator in the 19th century, with the assertion that photography is a "natural image...without any aid whatsoever from the artist's pencil" (88). While Sontag goes on to recognize and explain the artistic qualities of photographs and how perspective and context contribute to the weight of a photograph, her book's publishing date limits her ability to recognize the degree of irrelevance of Talbot's claim with regards to 21st century photography. Sontag's inclusion of this quote by Talbot without direct contradiction is misleading when looking at photography of the last decade. Before I lived in a dorm with Yuto Watanabe, the head of photography for the Phillipian and an active freelance photographer, I might have believed Talbot's assertion to be perfectly applicable to the modern times. However, after watching Yuto process photos for the Phillipian and for his personal and modeling photoshoots, I have grown skeptical that any photo in the news is free of Photoshop's mark.

        Yuto tells me that nearly every photo in fashion magazines, catalogues, and the news is photoshopped to express the message the publisher intends. These edits range from subtle or almost unnoticeable to blatant, egregious shifts in the subject matter. For example, here is the photo that the New York Times ran of Arizona killer Jared Loughner:

 http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/01/11/us/11loughner_75.html

In contrast, here is the photo run by ABC news:

http://abcnews.go.com/US/jared-loughner-alleged-tucson-shooting-gunman-appears-court/story?id=12580344

Looked at seperately, these photos appear almost identical. Despite different cropping, one could mistake them for exactly the same unaltered photo. However, if one looks at the photos side by side, the New York Times photo (which I gather from its widespread appearance in other news sources is the original mugshot of the suspect) has a more wan, yellowed tint, and looks slightly out of focus, as if an amateur mugshot photographer took the picture. The ABC photo, however, has some Photoshopped post processing that turns down the yellow and brings out the more natural color  in Loughner's face. Why would ABC choose to spend time editing a mugshot photo? ABC's photo looks more adroitly crafted, and appears sharper and more crafted than the New York Times photo, so perhaps ABC wanted to put forth a more polished image to subtly draw in news watchers. However, this slight alteration in the photo significantly skews interpretation in that the yellowed, sickly, out-of-focus look of the Times picture gives the reader a less human sense of the suspect, whereas the focussed, sharp construction of ABC's picture adds a tad of dignity to the suspect's maniacal grin. This slight difference has a subtle effect on the reader, and might be completely dismissed or ignored if the reader did not have external knowledge on modern photography outside of that with which Sontag provides us about Talbot's quote. In this subtle way, I felt that Sontag (through Talbot) somewhat misleeds her reader.