A history of photo manipulation
Note: Any popular definition of “doctored” can be used when reading this page; the definition used on this website is here.
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1. Manipulation in the film era
Much doctoring of film-era photographs is detectable upon inspection of the master print or negative (in contrast, even experts cannot reliably detect when a digital photo has been doctored).
Many cases of doctoring done in the pre-digital era are quite easy to spot: see for example the images from the exhibit and book Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop.
It wasn’t like it is today
In the film era, any significant doctoring and “retouching” of photographs was usually done by experienced experts (not by members of the general public, the way it is done now with smartphones).
Furthermore, before the digital era, undetectable manipulations to photographs were often limited to “light”-related manipulations (“tones and colors”), and then only with serious limits.
For example, it was very difficult in the film era to change the color of a depiction of clothing in a photograph without affecting the appearance of creases, folds, pleats, and wrinkles. That kind of change is now easy to do digitally.
The few kinds of non-“light”-related manipulations that could be carried out by hobby photographers in the film era — changes to “forms and shapes” — were fairly rudimentary (e.g., tilting parts of a darkroom enlarger to accomplish “perspective correction”).
Public expectations
In the film era, the public knew that it was difficult to doctor a photograph without detection. That’s why if a photograph in the film era looked convincing, the public usually trusted it. (See also this page)
For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, it was so difficult to undetectably doctor photographs that in the photography world the perception was that “If viewers don’t spot the manipulation, it’s not something they’ll care about.”
Thanks to a much-more-aware public, that sentiment is not heard very often in the digital age.
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2. The golden age of digital manipulation
By the late 20th century, digital technology was making serious inroads in the photography world.
From the 1990s into the first decade of the 21st century, photographers were able to do all kinds of manipulations they had only dreamed of for decades—
— and they could perform those manipulations confident that their viewers would not mistrust the photograph.
In other words, since “digital” allowed an unprecedented range of undetectable manipulations, photographers in the early digital era could generally assume that viewers wouldn’t notice that photos that looked “as undoctored as ever” had actually been doctored.
Photographers had moved into the future, but the public was still applying to photos the same expectations they had known in the film era, when most substantive manipulations could immediately be spotted.
For some years into the digital era much of the public still assumed that — just as in the film era — “If a photograph looks like it hasn’t been doctored, then it probably hasn’t been doctored.” (For more examples of “film think,” see here.)
Photographers who adopted “digital” knew better.
As it says on the effects-of-digital page, “suddenly an amateur photographer could perform on a photograph in a matter of seconds undetectable manipulations that the 20th-century masters of the darkroom — Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, etc. — could not have accomplished in several days.”
For a number of years, photographers and photo publishers were getting a “free ride,” and the viewing public was none the wiser.
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3. The free ride comes to an end
Of course, the “golden age of photo manipulation” couldn’t last forever.
The golden age had been built on the public’s naivete, and in the early 21st century — as the photography world moved from “film” to “digital” — people around the world were rapidly becoming more and more photographically literate.
By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, millions of people had learned firsthand how easy it is to manipulate digital photographs.
Granted, the public had been reading about digital manipulation since the early 1980s, but most people didn’t really “get it” until they witnessed it firsthand, from personal experience — by offloading photos from their digital cameras onto their home computers and then manipulating those photos.
By the end of the second decade of the 21st century, more than three billion people who had never carried a camera before had started carrying a camera with them all the time—
— and most of them had learned (from their own photos or from viewing social media) how easy it is doctor photographs with just a tap or swipe of a finger.
As a result,
— while in the film era, the public had assumed that “Convincing-looking photos are usually undoctored no matter how remarkable they look...”
— in the digital era, the public increasingly assumes that “Remarkable-looking photos are usually doctored or aigmented no matter how convincing they look” . . .
. . . unless explained otherwise, that is. (TTG was created to label the exceptions.)
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4. Leveling the playing field
It is now a win-win situation as TTG helps to “level the playing field” between photographers who choose to optimize “appearance” and photographers who choose to optimize “trustworthiness” (see this page).
• Image providers win (including TTG photographers) because when they want to optimize their audience’s trust, they can easily do so with use of the TTG label or via other alignments with TTG.
• Viewers win, because they can safely regard photographs as “claims” rather than “facts” (see #319). Viewers know that photographers now have the option of using TTG when they want to convince viewers to trust a particular photograph.
• Even non-TTG photographers win, because they are no longer burdened by the public’s expectation that a photographer is being misleading if he or she doesn’t alert viewers when an undoctored-looking photo has been doctored or aigmented.
Viewers are learning to assume that impressive photographs are “Doctored or aigmented unless explained otherwise” rather than expecting photographers to tell them when a photograph is doctored or aigmented; see also #920 and #200.
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The most obvious non-winners are photographers and photo publishers who benefited during “the golden age” (see #2 above) from having the public assume that doctored photographs were actually undoctored.
But few people have said they lament the passing of that era (see “C” on this page).
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