Is cropping a photo lying?

gr82bart · Oct 5, 2009

Demonizing Cheney is actually morally required! That man was bad. Anyway, this article does make one think.

http://kottke.org/09/09/is-cropping-a-photo-lying

Regards, Art.

gr82bart · Oct 5, 2009

Another related article.

http://www.aphotoeditor.com/2009/09/18/is-photo-manipulation-bad-for-photography/

Regards, Art.

Ian David · Oct 5, 2009

Cropping a photo (either in-camera or in the darkroom) is not lying. The lie occurs when somebody uses a photo to misrepresent the facts. TV and newspaper etc do that all the time, but we all know that those great institutions are pathological twisters of the facts.

BetterSense · Oct 5, 2009

Photography is lying.

I do my own darkroom work, so I can crop whenever I want. In the camera or in the darkroom. I'm the one doing it either way.

Sirius Glass · Oct 5, 2009

Cropping is part of photography. In this case, the editor cropped the photograph to show how the photograph should have been taken in the first place!

From the article:
Given Cheney's reputation, the cropped photo of him is not an outlandish or biased depiction of the man...in fact, it's a pretty good visual metaphor of the former VP.

Steve

Allen Friday · Oct 5, 2009

Photographs do not lie. Nor do they tell the truth. Photographers and editors, however, do often lie.

Vaughn · Oct 5, 2009

People lie with their words and sometimes with their images, but photographs themselves are mute and never lie.

Anscojohn · Oct 5, 2009

BetterSense said:
Photography is lying.

I do my own darkroom work, so I can crop whenever I want. In the camera or in the darkroom. I'm the one doing it either way.

*******
I agree. But sometimes cropping an original photo can convey a falsity. I think of two examples: a photo of a principal during the Army MaCarthy hearings which purported to show the Sec. of the Army smiling at him and him alone. The actual photograph showed he was one of a whole group of people. A second is one of the rifle used in the John Kennedy murder. Measurements were taken by conspiratorri which they used for certain relative measurements of dimensions, assuming the photograph showed the weapon parallel to the plane of the photograph. The uncropped photo showed the rifle to be not aligned to the plane of the camera, so the dimensional relationships were skewed. The first instance I would consider "lieing." The second, misinformation of a sort.

removed account4 · Oct 5, 2009

cropping a photograph is like using a different focal length lens.
it shows us a different perspective ... a different focus ...

Miskuss · Oct 5, 2009

Your question conjures up lectures on Roland Barthes and Semiotics. Endless debates on signs,signified and signifiers etc. University can be harmful to artistic growth. In MHO, if it looks good to you and it feels right, and says what you want your image to say, then that is all that matters. Crop away I say !!!! Purists be damned!

removed account4 · Oct 5, 2009

there is no such thing as a purist

Miskuss · Oct 5, 2009

jnanian said:
there is no such thing as a purist

purist, noun. One who practices or urges strict correctness, especially in the use of words.

Anscojohn · Oct 5, 2009

Like BetterSense, I try to do my cropping in the viewfinder. Sometimes I miss and can strengthen my composition by cropping in the darkroom. That makes me an Arteeste. Sometimes, though, I have to made adjustments. Frinstance. I shot two snapshots of a my god-daughter and her new hubby in a dim reception venue. Ok, my eyes are dimm, too. When the flash fired, I saw a dark panel separater growing out of the bride's head. I asked to take another; shifted position and shot again.
Upon souping the film, I find the bride's eyes were closing. So I am going to have to make a close crop at the top to de-emphasize the dark panel separator.
Cropping a photo for nefarious "political" purposes is another matter. And sometimes the purposes are not so obvious as in the Macarthy-era photo. I guess this debate is as old as the medium.

Sirius Glass · Oct 5, 2009

Allen Friday said:
Photographs do not lie. Nor do they tell the truth.

... but Phot$hop lies.

Steve

Sirius Glass · Oct 5, 2009

gr82bart said:
Demonizing Cheney is actually morally required! That man was bad.

You are a truly wise man.

Steve

2F/2F · Oct 5, 2009

Kennerly and Newsweek both have reasonable points. There is no black or white answer to the question. At least Kennerly was able to come out and say what he did without being jailed or executed. Bad journalism is one of the prices we pay for the liberties of speech that we have.

Tom Stanworth · Oct 6, 2009

No. That's absurd. Lets imagine you are standing in front of a scene with a GSW690. Why would shooting a scene with the 6x9 and cropping it to 6x7 be lying? Had you been there with a GSW670 the photo would be the same as the crop, right? Lets say you had both cameras, but one had run out of film and you just wanted to finish off the 6x9's roll... shot it and cropped it later, how on earth could this be a lie. You get the point.

To suggest that cropping is lying defies any logic I have ever heard. The formats we use may be due to preference or availability and have an influence on our vision but should surely not define it (otherwise what are we?). Ultimately they are incidental. Hopefully, the photos we make are not.

In the context of the article, if we deliberately choose a crop to present a perspective not reflective of the whole, while suggesting a truth in the image we present, it is not lying but an attempt to mislead perhaps. The image is a truth, but a truth that misleads when it comes to the whole?

Shangheye · Oct 6, 2009

The camera never lies, and neither does the photographer. The photographer expresses a point of view. That point of view can be at the time of releasing the shutter or after the fact. The issue is magnified here becasue a 3rd party chose to interpret the work to express it's view. I don't know that any of it matters. Unless you work for Magnum, where photographers retain editorial control of the use of their images), you are fair game. You could choose to put your own restrictions and watch your work dry up. Certainly, the minimum is that the magazine should have informed the photographer of their intent (do we know that they did not?). Photography is a powerful media becasue of it's ability to powerfully express a particular point of view through manipulation of the crop, time, light, mood, facial expression or even the person who is subject. Showing Cheyney slicing meet is only one..with all it's metaphors...but hey, if it wasn't cheyney slicing, the expression would have been lower and we would not be discussing it...see what I mean?

Q.G. · Oct 6, 2009

Photography is a medium, i.e. it is used to express things. What photographers choose to express depends on them. And they can lie through their teeth as well as anyone using any other medium. How they do it is quite inconsequential.

Tom Stanworth said:
No. That's absurd. Lets imagine you are standing in front of a scene with a GSW690. Why would shooting a scene with the 6x9 and cropping it to 6x7 be lying?[...]

It's the choice of what to show and what not to show, not how you do it.
I think it would be rather absurd to argue that you, the photographer, didn't leave something out of the frame, but that it was the frame size that did.

eddym · Oct 6, 2009

If cropping is lying, then all lenses except 180 degree fisheyes must be banned!
Oh, and what about "time cropping"? Still images must be banned!! Only video!

Give me a break...!

Q.G. · Oct 6, 2009

eddym said:
If cropping is lying, then all lenses except 180 degree fisheyes must be banned!
Oh, and what about "time cropping"? Still images must be banned!! Only video!

Lenses don't crop. Just like film formats don't crop.
You, the photographer, decide what gets in the picture and what not. You decide to use a longer lens or crop a negative to leave things out (if you do).
You, the photographer, also decide when to take a picture.

That in itself is of course still not lying.

Shangheye said:
The camera never lies, and neither does the photographer. The photographer expresses a point of view.

Wherein lies the potential lie.
"Neither does the photographer" is, uhm..., a lie.

removed account4 · Oct 6, 2009

Miskuss said:
purist, noun. One who practices or urges strict correctness, especially in the use of words.

i understand what you mean by purists ...
but there is no way for an image NOT to be cropped.
cropping is the same as editing.
we edit before the image enters the lens ..
we edit by using a specific lens or shutter speed or fstop ..

i don't think there can be any purity in photography

Shangheye · Oct 6, 2009

Q.G. said:
Wherein lies the potential lie.
"Neither does the photographer" is, uhm..., a lie.

I beg to differ, just because you disagree with what I am expressing does not make it a lie...Cheyney after all WAS slicing in to the beef...no? You just may disagree with how I used the moment.

Bruce Watson · Oct 6, 2009

Photography *is* cropping. One can't make a photograph without cropping in some way or form.

We don't have the "luxury" of starting from a blank canvas like a painter, painting in elements where and how we want them. Instead, we start with a cluttered canvas, and our job as photographers is to crop out the unwanted elements in order to show the elements we deem important. That's how photography works, and deciding what to show and what to leave out is the greater part of the art of photography.

Once you think about it, using a different aspect ratio than your film format provides, so called in-camera cropping, is utterly natural for a photographer. So is printing to the ratio you intended, rather than the ratio the film format imposes.

I'm not saying that letting the film format rule the photograph is necessarily wrong. Some people like working within that restriction and that's fine for them -- it's an individual choice. What I'm saying is there is nothing inherent in photography that says this is the way it has to be. There is not. There is nothing natural or "good" about letting the film format rule over the photographer's intent.

benjiboy · Oct 6, 2009

Pointing a viewfinder frame at anything is lying, because it is a subjective and partial view of reality.

Is cropping a photo lying?

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