Of Bigfoot and Kate
Before Substack I was constrained to write evergreen articles that could be sent out at any time, whereas I am now free to write about events… events such as the widely speculated and talked about photograph of Kate Middleton. I know what you are thinking, the picture is old news; we know now that Kate Middleton has cancer and is receiving chemotherapy, an admission that has been rightly received with the respect and empathy is deserves.
The story around the photograph really doesn’t need to be rehearsed. It was discussed ad nauseam two weeks ago. The important thing to remember is she hadn't been seen after her surgery. People started to theorize that she was dead. It would seem that the picture was shared in the hope of ending rumors and securing a little privacy. In the intense scrutiny that followed (a scrutiny I find baffling and bewildering), many edits were found in the picture which, of course, only nourished the speculation. The truth of the situation is so tragic and real that the conspiracy theories wither in its light. The reason a picture was used to assuage the public's concerns was because of a photograph's inherent, albeit sometimes flawed, believability.
It wasn't always this way. Take King Richard III, the last of the Plantagenet kings, killed in battle in 1485. The earliest paintings of Richard, however, date to at least twenty years later. All we know of the king is hearsay, Tudor propaganda (the Shakespeare play) and other posthumous paintings. How is the truth about anything known before the advent of film and photography?
Barthel II, Richard III.1520
Well, before the advent of photography we had to take a person’s word for it. A painting, for example, is one person’s interpretation of reality, vulnerable to all the weaknesses that would entail. Contrarily, the photograph has stood as a credible witness of fact. As a mechanical device, a photograph can be seen as objective proof, empirical evidence. It is not susceptible to the handicaps of human subjectivity. When someone sees a photograph they can assume that the image that is captured existed. Imagine I say “I saw Bigfoot!” If I show you a photo, you would be more likely to believe that I saw Bigfoot. Now imagine I drew a picture of Bigfoot, the claim would not gain any credibility by the so-called evidence.
The Caveat
Take the Bigfoot picture. As soon as I develop the picture, people will have doubts of its authenticity; they will scrutinize the photograph. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs. And everyone knows that manipulation of photos is as old as the medium. The mother’s day pose of Kate and her children seems to have undergone the kind of manipulation that we are speaking of. When the Palace released the doctored photograph, perhaps they were hoping that it would quell rumors and provide a respite for the beleaguered family. The fact that the photo was manipulated only exasperated conspiracy theories and energized the keyboard warriors. If you saw my Bigfoot had a zipper running up the back you would know I am a liar. The faulty evidence becomes an indictment in itself. If I produced a drawing, you can never make such an assumption, because the drawing isn't seen as evidence in the first place
Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin Bigfoot film
Despite being vulnerable to manipulation, a photograph occupies a strange epistemological space where what is seen is perceived as true… until proven false. The photograph holds a position of trust and when a lie is discovered the sense of betrayal is felt. Susan Sontag (someone who did more than her share of thinking and writing on the subject of photography) points out in her essay Regarding the pain of others, “What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged and always disappointed.” We desire to have an authority, a truth, and photography still holds that space. But everything might soon change.
My Bigfoot rendering is only as credible as I am, as an avowed witness. I can make a perfectly life-like portrait of someone who exists (one would say photographic to express how lifelike) or I can make an entirely lifelike rendering of something that doesn't exist like Bigfoot. The thing is, I, as a human, can construct anything that I see or can imagine. I am the source. As Sontag writes in her book On Photography, “The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.” Photographs have to have a source image. If indeed my photograph of Bigfoot was staged, I would have had to have a guy in an ape suit to be photographed. The image of Kate suggests that a person called Kate Middleton existed at the time of the photograph, even if it was altered by Photoshop. Photoshop made manipulation easier and more believable, but that original source was always necessary in a photograph. Photography can not create the way an artist can.
A.I. is a different story. With A.I. there is no need for sloppy manual manipulation or slightly less sloppy Photoshop manipulation. Every pixel can be generated from scratch the way that a painter can generate alternate worlds from an accumulation of brush strokes. The medium of A.I. and digital photography are identical (ones and zeros) so, presumably, there will be no way to distinguish between the two. A fantastical image can now (or soon) be generated and have as evidentiary weight as a digital photograph.
The surveillance photographs that Sontag wrote about in the seventies, and that are ubiquitous today, could become redundant. And in every other situation the photograph will lose its privileged place as authoritative. If a witness can lie, it should be assumed he is lying. In a world where photography can be generated from scratch, it will rest aside painting as subjective, only as believable as the person presenting it. In this world doubt will once again reign. Yes, we all strive for truth, to know what is outside of Plato’s cave. But photography will not provide even a snapshot of it; it probably never has.