Photoshop: Sophomoric barrier to truth

The divide between old-school stink-finger photographers and new-age digital photographers is wide and deep.

Creation of present-day images and the objectives therein - beauty, communication, human interest, and the rest of it - haven't changed much except for the technical speed, accuracy and convenience offered by the digital era.

Unfortunately, it is an era that allows, through the magic of Photoshop, the ability to alter images that cannot be - except for the logic of them - discerned from real images. Thus has Photoshop become the ruination of believable imagery.

Used to be that when you saw a photograph you were required to make a literal interpretation. A photo couldn't lie. There were certain alterations, however, that could be concocted in the darkroom, but they were clumsy and obvious. You can see examples within my own work - double-negative prints, paste-ups, and filtering for instance. But few if any photographers back then would stoop to passing off a darkroom-faked image as unaltered.

Coming up the ranks as a photographic technician wasn't all that much of an easy skate to begin with, not compared to requirements of today: understanding and memorization of the digital camera's owner manual and likewise for Photoshop. The study of stink-finger darkrooming today is akin to the rewards of mountain-climbing.

If technique to the perfect image is easier now and the education and experience leading thereto is shorter, so much the better. I'm for making life easy as possible and I'm totally digital now. But I can no longer pretend to enjoy the challenge of discerning between the real and the Photoshopped.

There seems to be multitudes of these new-age image scammers who crank out these sophomoric and faked "photos" of carni-like oddities and send them via Internet to gullible folks who feel compelled to religiously spam their entire e-mailing lists with this crap.

Photoshop has become, among "photographers" with juvenile intellect, one more barrier to truth in a world where truth is more precious than ever.