Journal

Everything in the frame is a decision

People argue about Photoshop as though retouching were the moment a photograph stops being true. It isn't. By the time anyone opens a file, forty decisions have already been made, and every one of them has shaped what you are going to believe about the person in the picture.

The burger on the board at McDonald's was never cooked. It may have been painted, shot in layers, composited, or built entirely in CGI. Most people know this in the abstract and almost nobody applies it to the photographs of human beings they scroll past a few hundred times a day.

What is doing the work, in order

Before a single adjustment layer: how someone holds themselves, and what persona they walked in carrying. Then makeup — contour and highlight are sculpture. Then hair; a slicked-back mohawk reads as dominant on a person who would otherwise read as submissive, and nothing about them has changed. Then the pose, which can be provocative or luring or strong or matriarchal, and is chosen.

Then lighting, which is the one I enjoy most, because it changes the argument fastest. Fill the shadows and a face opens up. Kill two lights and the same face goes shadowy and grungy and the whole message changes.

Then the lens. A 50mm gives roughly the angle of view and perspective we read as normal — not because it matches the eye optically, but because nothing in the frame is stretched or compressed. You meet the subject about as you would across a table. Put a 70mm on at f/2.8 and the background dissolves — and that is not a real experience, it is a created one. You do not walk around seeing people with the world blurred away behind them.

Then angle. Photograph someone from the ground with their boot above your head, or from above with them below you, and you have told two different stories about who has power. Then aperture, which decides what the viewer is allowed to look at — the same job the lighting does, and the same job a lapel mic does for sound.

Then the decision to work in black and white, which is the most quietly radical one on the list. We see in colour. Render a person in monochrome and the viewer is taken out of their own reality and made to look at the subject differently, before they have registered a single thing about the content.

Where I put the line

Some photographers will tell you that any manipulation is a betrayal, and others that anything goes because it is all construction anyway. In my experience neither survives contact with a real shoot.

What I do is edit toward what the work needs and then pull it back, blending the original in to keep some sense of reality. The test I use is simple: can the person in the photograph still see themselves in it? If they can, I have not taken anything from them.

For a campaign built around a story, altering a body is legitimate — as long as everybody knows that is what is happening. That is the whole ethical line, and it is about consent to the fiction, not just consent to the photograph.

The picture isn't finished when I stop

Where a work is seen changes what it means. Poor stock in a throwaway magazine says one thing; heavy stock says the thing matters. RGB on a lit screen is not CMYK on paper. A gallery is not a phone. And what a work hangs beside — aligned with or contrasting against — is part of what it says.

Then the viewer arrives with their own symbology, learned or adopted or cultural or so deeply ingrained they would not call it symbology at all, and reshapes the thing again. The purpose a work was made for is not always how it lands. That is not a flaw in the process. It is the process.

Why this should be taught at school

Photography is art, and it should be understood as not real — because it isn't. It is altered perception. It is artificial. It is hyperreality, and it is the water people swim in from the age of about eight.

If that were taught properly — from year twelve or younger — I think people would have a healthier relationship with their own faces. You can enjoy a constructed image enormously once you know it is constructed. What damages people is measuring themselves against something built by a team of professionals over two days and presented as a Tuesday afternoon.

The goal is to perceive and enjoy artwork rather than be the victim of it.