The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era

Mitchell suggests that after believing for over a hundred years in the notion of objective truth in photography (read film), its hegemony as a reliable witness has come to an end with digital imaging (read digital video). Since the ontology of documentary film (shot on film) is closely tied to that of photography, the effect of digital video on documentary is very similar to that of digital imaging on photography, except that maybe the house of cards has fallen in a different manner, since cinema is “truth at 24 frames per second” as Jean-Luc Godard once said, compared to a picture being worth a thousand words.

True to Marshall McLuhan’s maxim, the content of every new medium is the previous medium. Digital video, when compared to motion picture film, is no different. To suggest that digital imaging contains film is not to suggest that there aren’t several significant philosophical differences in their respective underpinnings. Cinematography is based on photography and digital cinema imaging is based on digital imaging. As Mitchell writes,

…digital imaging technology represents a new “configuration of intention [and] focuses a powerful (though frequently ambivalent and resisted) desire to dismantle the rigidities of photographic seeing and to extend visual discourse beyond the depictive conventions and presumed certitudes of the photographic record. (p. 59)

Without the reliable “indexical” reference of photography, it becomes difficult to claim “I was there” or “this really happened” or “this is evidence of an event,” and documentary, which was already on shaky ground in terms of truth claims, is now thrown into a full fledge ontological crisis. A large number of journalists, scientists, and documentary filmmakers find the malleability of the photographic image disturbing.

We are still in the process of developing a comprehensive theoretical framework to deal with the malleability of images. Mitchell ends Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era with,

…the emergence of digital imaging has irrevocably subverted [...] certainties [of recorded facts], forcing us to adopt a far more wary and more vigilant interpretive stance [...] and confronted us with the inherent instabilities and indeterminacies of [...] meaning. (p. 225)

and continues,

…as we enter the post-photographic era, we must face once again the ineradicable fragility of our ontological distinctions between the imaginary and the real, and the tragic elusiveness of the Cartesian dream. (p. 225)

and thus the possibility of documentary truth comes to an end. Or does it? Truth, whatever we make of it in documentary, is a notion that has never relied exclusively on the photographic image. Rumors of the death of the possibility of truth claims in documentary have been greatly exaggerated. How “truth” is constructed is a complex process that has always involved more than just a dependency on the photographic image, which was never such a reliable witness in the first place.

In his article “From Real to Reel: Entangled in Non-Fiction Film” in Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge University Press, 1996), Noël Carroll argues that,

In any given field of research or argument, there are patterns of reasoning, routines for assessing evidence, means of weighing the comparative significance of different types of evidence, and standards for observations, experimentation and for the use of primary and secondary sources that are shared by practitioners in that field. Abiding by these established practices is, at any given time, is believed to be the best method for getting at the truth.

Thus, since photographic evidence is only part of the system of evidence that filmmakers can provide in their documentary, order can be preserved and the ontological crisis is averted, at least for now.

Any given documentary should be analyzed in terms of standards essentially determined by non-photographic evidence, and that “film truth” based on a photographic record never had much substance or validity to start with. Even before digital trickery, documentary filmmakers have used clever editing or inappropriate B-Roll to lie with their images, Michael Moore’s Roger and Me providing a canonical example. It’s always been the rhetorical skill of the filmmaker that most effectively determines veracity of documentary in contrast to fiction. I think many (but certainly not all) documentary filmmakers would agree with Werner Herzog that it is the “ecstasy of truth” we’re after, not some Platonic truth, as if there were such a thing in the first place.

Bill Mitchell died this summer. He was a brilliant scholar and teacher. I never had a chance to take a class from him while I was at MIT, but I did have the pleasure one day of walking with him through the Stata Center as he spoke about the architectural program of the building. It was one of the most informative and delightful tours I’ve ever experienced. Wit, wisdom, and a love of architecture brought the ideas that drove the design of the building alive in my mind.

Check out this link: www.berwickinstitute.org/bri/bumpkinisland for more details and information about the special Art Encampment boat shuttle that will deliver you directly from Boston to the island and back to the mainland! If you’re thinking of going, reserve a space on the boat now, as it will fill up and the alternatives are painful for they involve changing boats, the direct ferry is the best way to get there and back!

I’m involved this year as a project fellow documenting the Encampment. I will make the footage accessible to both participating artists and the public, working with interested collaborators to develop a participatory documentary on the project. If you visit this weekend, please consider making media (sketching and/or taking photos and/or recording audio and/or shooting video and/or writing) of your experience and sharing it with me. Contact me if you would like more details about my project.

Update, October 12, 2010

Here are some of the photos I took at the encampment this year:

Photo: Kate Dodd, “Ebb and Flow, ” 2009 Bumpkin Island Art Encampment, photo by Patrick Johnson.

The Berwick Research Institute joined with the Island Alliance and Studio Soto to present the 2nd Annual Artist Encampment, a "homesteading" experience on Bumpkin Island, Boston Harbor Islands, on Labor Day weekend, August 28-September 1, 2008.

Ten artists and artist collectives were each given one plot of prime, arable land on Bumpkin Island. As island "homesteaders" during the five days, they built temporary shelters on the land, lived on the land for four nights, and improved the land via site-specific project or performance. The various installations I managed to see (text borrowed from artist encampment project descriptions) while I were:

New England Expeditionary Alliance: Dedalus Wainwright, Bryan Long, Michael Andelman and Jeff Cleary – A scientific mission that mapped Bumpkin Island’s metaphorical, literal, and sensual parameters, Alliance members lead expeditions, generated hypotheses, established a classification system, created analysis, and gave lectures on their findings.

Astrodime Transit Authority: Bebe Beard, John Gayle, Ali Horeanopoulos, Mary Ann Kearns and Sam Smiley – C Celebrated the 150th year of the first attempt to lay the Transatlantic Cable by creating Bumpkin Island’s first "trans-gut" phone.

Spirits in the House: Then & Now: Sharon Haggins Dunn explored change and continuity of natural and human forces over time and the spirituality of place in an installation based mostly on materials from the ruins of the children’s hospital that was operated on the island.

The Camoufleurs: Hanna Rose Shell and Dan Hisel: Drawing on artisanal weaving techniques, military concealment strategies, and bird nesting practices, the camoufleurs transformed their land, and its particular human and natural ecology, into a camouflaged homestead environment.

Stone House, Urban City: Wenxiong Lin, Lynn Lee, Jens Stenger, Annie Wilker – Juxtaposing two themes of time (history and modernity; reality and romanticism), the artists created a model urban city in the stone farmhouse ruins, and framed windows of the naval mess hall ruins with brightly colored curtains.

Leave one for your ancestors, one for your children, and take one: Tiffany Dumont, Else Eaton, Raymond Garrett, Rory Jackson – Artists foraged island materials to create interactive, multimedia installations based on past, present and future. Artists encouraged visitors to add to the pieces, forage responsibly, and participate in performance.

Tactilist Theatre: Erik Conrad engaged in sensory deprivation for a week on the mainland, allowing him greater sensitivity as he identified island objects according to their tactile values. Arranged on the island in "theatre of touch," the artist, in the role of impressario, invited visitors to engage in a narrative performance based on a tactile values.

Survival Kit: Gabe Moylan & Rachel Roberts: Living off only the bare-bones survival kit provided by the Federal Emergency Management Association, the artists will use island-found objects to recreate family photos, common domestic objects and items of spiritual value often overlooked in disaster recovery.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow…

very interesting reading on the truthfulness of images.

Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University who studies the impact of new media on human interaction, said: “I watch students come to the realization that there’s an internal contradiction in their lives. They both want to be famous and they want to be authentic, and yet there’s something in their striving to archive their lives that’s inauthentic.”

One of his former students recently posted his own proposal photographs on Facebook, he noted. That site and others like MySpace “allow them to be their own publicists,” he went on. “Which ties in with the marriage thing. It really is a fascinating phenomenon. It’s almost like if it’s not on Facebook, it didn’t happen.”

I’m starting to wonder if we should produce less media, rather than more?

OK, so the big question is, what’s the tiny Canon TX1 like as a video camera? To answer the question, I made a short video this weekend. I’m not much for testing with charts and side by side comparisons these days, image quality is only part of the camera equation, so instead I do some shooting and from the results, I ask the question, is the image quality reasonable given all the other aspects of the camera that come into play when making the decision of what camera to purchase or use, for example, handling, form-factor, weight, cost, features, image processing, media formats, lens, ease-of use, etc.?

If you go to the movie page on blip.tv, under the “Play video in alternate format:” pop-up, you’ll have access to the following formats: 1. Large iPod Video (1:52, 21.2MB, 640 x 360 H.264, Stereo, default QuickTime Pro Export settings), 2. AppleTV Video (1:52, 50.3MB, 960 x 540, H.264, Stereo, default QuickTime Pro Export settings), 3. Flash version (transcoded by blip.tv, not sure of the exact settings, audio is 64 kbit/sec mono). I’ve also posted to Flickr a set of frame grabs from the original Motion JPEG frames so you can see the quality of the image prior to compression for web delivery.

Click To Play

All the video and audio was left “as is” with the TX1, no color correction or post-production processing on the audio or video, the only thing I did was import the video clips into Final Cut Pro and edit them on a DVCPRO HD timeline. Some horizontal resolution is lost going into the DVCPRO HD format, however, it’s pretty minor.

This test was designed to show the camera in real-world conditions, not in the best light, so there’s some shooting under relatively low light conditions. Most of the shots exhibit the noise that comes part and parcel with shooting in situations with less than optimum lighting.

Since the conversion to iPod movies and Flash for web viewing (which is what’s available on the blip.tv page) adds additional artifacts to the original image, and since the conversion from the Motion JPEG original to DVCPRO HD for editing also adds some additional artifacts, I’ve posted a series of frame grabs from the original video files so you can see the quality of the original Motion JPEG frames.

Video that is noisy does not compress as well as video that is clean to start with, so starting with an HDV or H.264 original would yield better compressed video than the Motion JPEG implementation in the TX1. In most shooting situations you’re going to see lots of noise in the image with this camera unless you’re shooting outdoors during the day.

Shots were made using auto white balance, 720p 30fps mode, auto focus (face tracking turned off).

I’ve been shooting with a Canon S100 Digital Elph since 2000, and after seven years the camera was looking very long in the tooth, with dead pixels and starting to fall apart, it was time for an equally tiny replacement. For serious still shooting I’ve got a Canon 10D w/ an EF 24mm-70mm f/2.8 lens, and for video, a Sony HVR-A1U HDV camcorder, and even though the images from both of these puppies are spectacular, I don’t always want to deal with the weight and bulk of these cameras. I like having a small digital camera I can take with me wherever I go, that I can wear on my belt and forget it’s there. But I also would like to shoot short movie segments, so I’ve been waiting for something with at least 1280 x 720 (720p) video capability in the Digital Elph form factor. Finally Canon introduced the TX1 that fits the bill, so after years waiting and considering, yet not purchasing, many alternatives, I settled on the TX1.

In a subsequent post I’ll Post and discuss some of the movie clips I I’ve shot with the camera, as far as stills go, check out the May 6, 2007 Boston Media Makers Meeting Photo Set I recently posted to Flickr, all of these images in the set were shot with the TX1. I’m not going to go over the features and specifications of this camera in great detail, that information is readily available in Digital Photography Review’s review of the camera. In this post I’m going to focus on my qualitative experience of the camera and summarize the strengths and weaknesses of the camera.

The camera is small and easy to handle after a short aclimation period. The LCD viewfinder is bright and crisp, and shows grid lines to make it east to keep your photos aligned nicely.

I was pleased with the overall quality of the still images I shot under good lighting conditions or using flash. Photos taken with the flash were sometimes over-exposed, and I got the occational red-eye (even through red-eye reduction was set on) more often than I expected. When you shoot without Flash, if you set the ISO on auto or to 800 and above, the images are really noisy, as you would expect. I still prefer to use my Canon 10D w/ 24-70mm f/2.8 lens for hand-hend phtography in low-light, often with a monopod, not only are the high ISO results better, but the auto focus is much better. It’s not fair to compare a $1,500 D-SLR and a little $500 point and shoot, but someday I hope it is. Some of the TX1 photos in the above set were shot with a monopod to offset the effect of camera shake so I could shoot at a lower ISO rating.

The camera uses a 7.1 megapixel CCD imager with a 6.5-65mm f/3.5-5.6 (35mm equivalent 39–390mm) 10x optical zoom lens, but that’s the price you pay for such a tiny lens. My gripe is that the wide is not as wide as I would have liked, I do lots of close-in shooting. The OIS (optical image stabilization) worked reasonably, and Canon claims the camera uses their Digic III image processor. The camera is capable of shooting in very low light if you don’t mind lonts of noise in the image, with an ISO rating of up to 1600.

Video quality is reasonable for such a tiny camera, however, even though video can be recorded at a resolution as high as 1280 x 720 at 30fps, it’s not anywhere near as good as video shot with an HDV (MPEG-2) or AVCHD (MPEG-4/H.264) camcorder. The TX1 uses Motion-JPEG, an older format with a much higher bit rate for the quality compared to H.264 or MPEG-2. The only real advantage of Motion-JPEG is low processor overhead, and in such a tiny camera, it’s an issue. I suspect, over time, we’ll see the move towards using better codecs in this form factor. The 1280 x 720 movies look much better when reduced to half-size 640 x 360, but I’ve not been shooting the smaller size movies because starting with the larger image gives you some flexibility in terms of zooming if you need it.

My greatest disappointment with the camera is that even though I found the face-detect auto focus worked reasonably well, the problem for me is that the camera does not offer an easy way to quickly switch between face-detect auto focus and standard auto focus. Sometimes the face-detect auto focus works well, but when it’s not working, you want to be able to turn it off in an instant, and turn it back on when you think it’s going to work well and then back off when the situation changes, and so on and so forth. Instead the mode switch has to be done by going into the menu. The camera offers one assignable button and this switching should be assignable to that button, but it is not. Although the camera automatically switches to AF mode when it can’t detect a face, the problem is when it detects the wrong face or you want something other than a face focused upon. The 9-point auto-focus is only available in single shot mode, in continuous mode it’s based on a center point. There is also no maunal focus. This would be nice, but I don’t exect it in a camera like this.

In a nutshell, the strengths of this camera lie in the small form-factor, and ability to shoot both stills and video, the use of high capacity and high performance SD memory cards, and reasonably good image stabalization.

Weaknesses include the widest lens setting is not very wide, there is no quick on/off face-recognition auto-focus button (you can’t quickly turn it on and off), long shutter lag, lack of manual focus, and very noisy low-light results.

Great camera if you want something small and need both stills and video. I suspect as memory prices continue to drop and tiny embedded processors get faster and faster, we’re going to see a growing number of hybrid camera/camcorders on the market, I think the TX1 is just the beginning of a whole new wave of tiny HD cameras.

Will I have to go looking for a replacement, or eat my words and actually use software from Microsoft in a creative context? One thing, no matter what digital asset management software you use, make sure you are not trapped by it, that your metadata and images are always stored in an open and accessible non-proprietary form of storage. Because iView allows me to sync the metadata in their catalog with the metadata in the JPEG file headers, I am not trapped using iView Media Pro and I’m free to consider other options without alot of hassle making the move. I’m concerned that after the acquisition, iView Media Pro may start to take on the quality of other Microsoft products: bloated, feature-rich, and laden with bugs and other problems.

You can embed the metadata you create right into the JPEG images using industry standard IPTC and Adobe XMP schemes. The UI for adding metadata is much nicer than Photoshop’s in my opinion, and for this alone I’d get this program.

For HTML slide galleries on the web, you simply select the images you want in the slide show, and choose “Make HTML Gallery” from a menu and choose the size of thumbnails and images and off you go. The software also supports creating custom templates so the photo pages on the web can look the way you want. One nice thing I’ve taken advantage of is annotating images with captions and then when I make a web side show the captions can be automatically included with each image. iView is a well thought out program.

I’ve also used Gallery, an open source server-based program for uploading, annotating, and displaying images, but I find that making html galleries with iView and uploading the folder to a server is much easier, and keeping my photo collection on my own computer makes for faster workflow compared to web-based solutions. One easy methodology is to create HTML slide shows and place them in a folder on your workstation or laptop and then synchronize that folder with a folder on your web server, so new images and galleries automatically get updated when your connected to the net.

Another bonus is that since standard metadata is stored in the images themselves (you have to explicitly sync iView with the files to have the metadata embedded in the files themselves) you’re not dependent on iView, you can switch to another photo organizing program in the future, and since the metadata can be embedded in the images themselves, you can simply import into a database or other image organization and viewing program. iView also has nice metatada export capability. It’s an open tool, it does not try to lock you in like some other programs in a similar category.

Temple Bar, Dublin


Spinnin’



Four Chairs



Lipstick



After Dinner



River

Several years ago I decided I wanted a digital camera, but nothing on the market at the time met my minimum requirements: (1) $500 or less price point, (2) small form factor about the same size as my current camera (I had a Canon Film Elph and was perfectly happy shooting film and scanning the images), (3) minimum of 2.1 Megapixels, and (4) simple and elegant.

I’ve been using the S100 for a year now and I’m very pleased with it. No regrets. My two Canon AE-1s, many FD lenses, and Mamiya C330 are feeling neglected and getting a tad jealous. Film is still the medium of choice for critical applications, but 98% of my photography is casual snapshots and artistic exploration. Digital is just fine for these uses. I can take S100 everywhere I go and it’s a joy to shoot with. I’ve yet to see another camera in its price category that surpasses it in overall price/performance except for its successor, the S110.

I’m still considering what to replace my two Canon AE-1s and collection of Canon FD lenses with, but I’ve not settled on anything. The Mamiya will be the last to go, because it will take a little longer for digital to kill off medium format. “Rumors of film’s death are still greatly exaggerated,” to borrow a phrase, but with developments in digital imaging moving at a rapid pace, who knows when it will be time to replace my 35mm system, but I suspect an eBay auction is just around the corner.

The new S110 keeps all of the basic S100 features and adds improved image processing performance and the ability to capture short movie clips. The clips can be played back in the camera (without audio). If uploaded to a PC or connected to a TV via the A/V cable, you’ll get sound and picture. This is a delightful feature and is reminiscent of the joy of shooting with a Pixelvision camera.

Camera settings allow you to choose the image size and quality: 640×480 Fine (moderate JPEG compression); 1600×1200 Fine; 1600×1200 Super Fine (less severe JPEG compression). Exposure compensation and white balance settings are provided. The optics are a 5.4mm – 10.8mm F/2.8-4.0 zoom, which is the equivalent of a 35-70mm zoom on a 35mm camera. There’s also a digital zoom, but I would avoid it. Images can be previewed on the LCD display or with the real-image optical viewfinder with zoom. The camera has a light-assisted autofocus system that kicks in when the normal contrast focusing system is unable to focus due to low light conditions. If needed it projects light in the center of the field of view in order to determine the focus. This allows the camera to focus in complete darkness.

This excellent focus system is also a source of a problem. This camera seems to take more than its share of flash pictures with people’s eyes closed. Since the system uses white light to project the pattern, the flash of light appears so bright in dark settings that subjects often blink just in time for the actual exposure. I’ve snapped more flash pictures of people’s eyes closed that I care to think about, however, there is a workaround: you can depress the shutter button half way, this triggers the auto focus light, wait a second for people to blink, then take the flash photo. You can also lock the focus at infinity or switch to macro for close-ups, the actual closest focus distance varies depending on the focal length.

The camera is elegant. It holds it’s own against classic beauties of form and function like the Minox 35mm and Minox spy cameras. The design is not only skin deep: the function of its controls is very well thought out. For example, sliding the zoom switch while in Play Mode displays the thumbnail index where you can quickly search through the stored images. When a picture is displayed on the LCD screen you can slide the zoom switch to see as portion of the photo magnified and scroll through the image to see more details. The designers really thought through the usability of this product. Another example is the ability to rotate photos in the camera so both vertical and horizontal shots are displayed properly during playback. Once you become familiar with it’s controls, things become second nature quickly as you internalize the logic of it’s design.

My favorite feature of the camera is the night flash mode, this gives you the ability to shoot a flash photo while keeping the shutter open for a longer than normal exposure time. This was designed to allow backgrounds to come out better exposed when shooting with flash at night. I use it along with shaking the camera for taking all those blurry photos in my photo albums. This camera (like all snapshot cameras) is at it’s best when you’re not taking ordinary full-frontal flash photos.

The S-110 comes with one rechargeable lithium battery and a rapid charger. If you buy this camera you will immediately find you need buy a second battery. It is extremely hard to estimate battery life in terms of solid numbers, but I can tell you I use the second battery all of the time. You can extend battery life by not using the LCD display and refrain from flash photos, but I’d rather carry an extra battery at all times. This way when you are shooting lots of photos one battery can be in the camera and the second on the charger.

The Image Browser software supplied by Canon for the Macintosh is pretty nice ( I can’t say anything about the Windows offering). The Image Browser allows you to organize all of your photos. The actual photos and folders are just files and folders in the finder, but the image browser provides a nice interface for reviewing photos, putting on slide shows, and launching your favorite image editing application, all from one interface. The camera is also supplied with a photo stitching application for combining multiple images into one large photos, the results are acceptable, but I prefer to do this in Photoshop.

Check out my gallery of S100 photos (index in the margin, disclosure: most have been post-processed in Photoshop) and I think you will agree that the S100 and S110 are impressive performers, especially among digital cameras in this price category. Combined with Photoshop the creative potential of this little camera is astonishing: a small imaging device that fits in the palm of your hand backup up by a complete photo laboratory on your desktop. Photography has never been so much fun. No more waiting for film to be developed. No more long hours dodging and burning prints. I held out a long time to go digital, and I’m glad I waited. For me, the S100 with it’s small form-factor was the catalyst that has changed the way I shoot photographs.