Ann Thomas the Senior Curator of Photographs at the National Gallery of Canada made some interest points about truth in photography as part of her April 21, 2020, virtual presentation and response during the Capture Festival. What I found particularly interesting was her response to a question of how untruthful photography might be in today’s digital world.

Her response to this question was as follows. “Whether digital born or analogue created, the idea that a photograph inherently conveys truth is a misconception. This was confused from the beginning with a recorded image’s ability to appear naturalistic, i.e. to approximate what the human eye sees. This is contradicted by the fact that the act of composing a view is an act of selecting “truth.” The Gustave Le Gray seascape The Great Wave, Sète, 1857, or Henry Peach Robinson’s Hark! Hark! the Lark!, 1882, and William Notman’s Terra Nova, Snowshoe Club, 1875, in The Extended Moment are the results of composing a scene with the use of multiple negatives, and are thus fictions.“

Image manipulation, she is pointing out, is in fact as old as photography itself. Like painters photographs strive to capture the essence of the scene they are looking at and like painters adjust the image to make sure it does so. Even the act of framing a photograph is a process of deciding what is in the image and what is not. In other words, photography is an art form and as such is fiction, after all how can a two-dimension image accurately reflect a three-dimensional scene?

Gustave Le Gray’s seascapes caught with technical difficulties with the collodion process of creating images used two negatives one for the clouds and one for the sea. He did this because he needed different exposure times in order to capture the movement of the waves and the light in the sky. The end result was an image that received high acclaim in London and Paris. To my mind his thinking was not dissimilar to that of any artist, how do I use my tools to create a memorable image. Given he was working with the collodion process in a large format this must have been quite something for its time, given that the process was invented in 1851.

On the other hand William Notman’s photograph was done by staging an event for the camera, by assembling a group had having them pose for the image. Here the photographer was manipulating his subjects so it could create an artistic representation of what a snowshoeing party might have looked like. So it also is a fiction, an artist representation of life in Quebec in 1875.