Are photos even real?
Word Count: 1427
I’ve been wondering about this for a fair few months now, ever since I heard it mentioned in a Vergecast episode, or perhaps a video before that on computational photography, or perhaps even before that, when I was writing that joyous exposé into my thoughts on memory. Because that’s what it is for, isn’t it? We take photos largely to remember. Of course, there are those that take photos for art, to edit and beautify to evoke a nice mixture of emotions like Remy’s visualization of taste from Ratatouille, but even that style of photography bears its roots in the idea of remembrance, of giving someone a long-lasting feeling of a place they saw, or never saw but felt like they did because of you and your photo.
granularity.
A photograph (colloquially referred to by everyone as a photo) has a few definitions, depending on the granularity; here is where the journey of the impostor photo begins. I’ll begin by stating some examples from reputable dictionaries, and will try to order them by pedantry or some other silly metric. Also, I feel it prudent to mention that this all sounds like the beginning of a cheesy wedding vow (“Merriam-Webster’s dictionary says that ‘love’ is defined as…”), but I hope that you, dear reader, will kindly ignore that point. Anywho.
some definitions.
Cambridge Dictionary defines a photograph as a picture produced by a camera, and says that a camera is a device for taking photographs. Brilliant. The Collins dictionary shares this exact definition.
Merriam-Webster defines a photograph as a picture or likeness obtained by photography, which is immediately unhelpful because now we have to chase through several more definitions. We’ll skip picture, and likeness is relatively similar in nature, so the main one is photography, which they cite as being “the art or process of producing images by the action of radiant energy and especially light on a sensitive surface (such as film or an optical sensor)”. This! This is the good stuff, getting to the heart of the matter!
The Oxford English Dictionary does the most precise job, in my opinion, referring to a photograph as “A picture or image obtained by photography; (originally) a picture made using a camera in which an image is focused on to sensitive material and then made visible and permanent by chemical treatment; (later also) a picture made by focusing an image and then storing it digitally.” As an aside, it was insane that I had to use my Georgia Tech email to access a definition, otherwise I’d have had to use a subscription. Shocking, OED.
history.
Now that we’ve nicely sorted our definitions into the spectrum of insane to sane, we can begin discerning what we think a photo is, with a bit of history! The first known instance of development in this space is with the camera obscura, which leverages the property of light wherein it travels in a straight line to project an inverted image onto a wall after passing through a small hole. People later used mirrors to re-invert the image back to the correct orientation for viewing; it’s important to note that this is not technically a photo yet, as there was no way to “save” the state of this light image, it was simply a projection onto a surface. Next there were early photographs, which used the chemical properties of some materials (such as silver salts), notably that they reacted with sunlight. Scientists began devising methods to imprint images using the prior camera obscura work combined with this “storage” mechanism, creating the first rudimentary cameras and photographs! After this came a long series of developments in not only storage medium, but lens design, etc., all of which were chiefly analog in nature, at least by our standards today. Photographic film was the penultimate addition to the lineage of photographic development, and spurred by the modern age, took a life of its own. While the principle is the same, film is much more flexible as a medium and has much better precision in some ways, compared to the methods of yore. The ultimate development (finally, good riddance), is that of the digital camera, which takes the sensor data that was received and encodes it into data that is written onto a storage drive of some sort. Specialized semiconductor image sensors needed to be developed in order to do this, the two main types being Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) and active-pixel (CMOS) sensors, which translate the electromagnetic waves and their attenuation (variability through media) into signals (currents which encode information in circuitry). All that to say I have no real idea how they work, so please don’t ask. This is the type of technology being used in not just larger digital cameras, but also phone cameras. A sort of honorable mention, technological development wise, is the advent of computational photography, which we’ll surely get back to later.
using our foundations.
With all our expository rambling out of the way, we can begin examining some of our definitions and examples of photography. I think my qualms with photography are more modern than not, so let’s agree to safely call daguerreotypes, calotypes, and other pre 1900s photographs just that, photographs. I also see no reason why film cameras don’t count, as they still work on the same principles, using light based imaging onto a reactive surface to encode visual information at a specific time. Thusly, we have wandered into the den of the beasts, digital cameras and computational photography. Here, I think we get into the pedantry and semantics more than anything. By all good definitions, the journey of a photograph ends with the digital camera. One could probably better define a digital camera’s action as capturing and storing an image (by translating the light waves to data through specially designed sensors), rather than “capturing a photograph”, because no photograph is taken. So yeah, that’s one faux-photo down, on to the next.
In contrast with digital cameras as a development, which still require precious sensing and direct translation to data that’s stored, computational photography introduces an intermediary processing pipeline into the mix, which takes sensor data and “improves” it according to algorithms and usually to some particular end. For example, Google’s Pixel phones have a mode called “Night Sight” which uses certain computational techniques to drastically improve picture visibility and quality in low-light photography settings (well, as much as one can call it photography, I guess). I regularly watch videos from the MKBHD channel, which does tech reviews and has, in the past, conducted blind smartphone camera tests, which are always quite telling. In referencing this interview, Samsung EVP Patrick Chomet says this in a very nice Verge article:
There was a very nice video by Marques Brownlee last year on the moon picture. Everyone was like, ‘Is it fake? Is it not fake?’ There was a debate around what constitutes a real picture. And actually, there is no such thing as a real picture. As soon as you have sensors to capture something, you reproduce [what you’re seeing], and it doesn’t mean anything. There is no real picture. You can try to define a real picture by saying, ‘I took that picture’, but if you used AI to optimize the zoom, the autofocus, the scene – is it real? Or is it all filters? There is no real picture, full stop.
In addition to techniques to auto-balance exposure, saturation, ISO, aperture, etc., we also have techniques that automatically stitch images from multiple cameras for more information, for example. In many ways, what the one, two, or even three cameras on the back of our phone see is never what we see on the screen in front of us. Just like daguerreotypes and calotypes, which were two different types of early image storing mechanisms (i.e. photographs) when cameras were first being invented, nowadays different smartphones have their own camera styles, pros and cons, and features, almost entirely dependent on the computational photography techniques and algorithms used. It’s this insane level of preprocessing that makes me annoyed; more often than not, different phones taking comically different pictures frustrates me. Inane exposure makes photos more aesthetic at times, as do sharper photos on average, but this tends to over accentuate features of pictures, making them somehow less accurate than before.
All photos aren’t real, let’s just revel in the memories and the smiles we capture. Maybe I should buy a nice SLR camera and revel in my cool, hip back to the future analog resurgence. That sounds rather fun, honestly.