Article by Don Althaus. © 2006.

The other day, a student in my intermediate color class brought in a magazine he had just purchased with what appeared to be a wonderful landscape photograph. He stated this was the quality of work he hoped to produce some day. As this student read through the description of how the image was made, his mood went quickly from anticipation through disappointment to crestfallen. The image he was so taken with had been assembled in a computer using components from seven different photographs. The photograph appeared on one page and the "how it was made" description was several pages later.

He said he had been tricked by both the magazine and the "photographer." He went on to say that the scene as presented in the magazine never existed in reality and should not have been presented in a photographic context. But this was not just a passing comment on his part alone. Other students stated the same thing after looking at the image and then reviewing the article. These sentiments continued through the next several classes.

This is not the first time this debate has come up in my classes and the general sentiment has always been that digital imaging is different from photography and there should be some way to identify an image that has been assembled digitally as opposed to a "pure" photograph. As is the case so many times, the students are absolutely right. There should be a way to identify digital composites.

If we don't address the fundamental issues this brings up and are willing to continue to present and accept these composites as photographs, we run the real risk of having both digital imaging and photography rejected by the general public.

As this situation continues, it would seem that we have made very little progress, choosing to simply return to the golden age of pictorialism. We are going to re-fight the battle that raged in the 1930's. If you will remember the history of photography, in the early part of the 20th century, the pictorialists held that "any trick, contrivance or convenience (was) acceptable in the production of an image as long as it served the final product." This brought a reaction from such noted photographers and groups as Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Group f*64, etc. And it seems that those practicing digital imaging are in agreement with that pictorialist philosophy.

There are some things we have to do to correct this situation.

First, we have to stop calling digital imaging- the assembly of an image in a computer- "digital photography." Digital imaging is not photography and photography is certainly not digital imaging. While there is some crossover here- we can present photographs in a digital environment and we can present digital images through photo-style printing- there are a number of major differences. This is not to say one is "better" than the other, just that they are different.

Second, we have to begin to differentiate between digital imaging and photography from a fundamental standpoint. This is slightly different from simply not calling digital imaging digital photography. It is making the differentiation between the scene as we saw it and a scene as we would like it to be.

Photography is about the subject, what the photographer saw in that subject as it existed in reality and what was so compelling that it had to be photographed. To alter, add or delete elements of that subject is to present the subject as the photographer wanted to see it, not as it existed in its reality. Digital imaging is about reforming and reshaping the subject as we would have liked to have seen it.

Third, we have to develop a way to identify those digitally assembled images as digital images. A small emblem or logo could be either floated on the image and printed with it (the background color could be made transparent so it would be unintrusive as possible) or it could be printed with a caption line: