The Cottingley faries, a classic photographic con. Photo: Johnny Green/PA.
Just seen the latest Bond movie. OK, yes, Daniel Craig seems finally to have laid the ghost of Connery to rest. But what really caught my eye was one of the special effects.
Towards the end, a beautiful late-medieval palace subsides gradually into the waters of the Grand Canal in Venice, like a costumed lady languorously fainting within the tiers of her crinoline skirt. The detail is stunning and surefooted. It would surely pass muster if displayed to a (horrified) Ruskin.
This virtuoso display of the digitiser's art is a supreme example of what we have rapidly come to take for granted. As entertainment, the effects are to be relished. In terms of what our eyes can trust, though, they have an alarming dimension.
Our whole perceptual system is built to trust images that appear "real". It is designed to react selectively to clues that allow us to extract a functioning reality from the complex sensory array before us. Since the Renaissance, artists have learnt to exploit key clues as a way of inducing us to think that we are eyewitnesses. Leonardo and Dürer drew dragons as convincingly as cats.
With photography, the level of trust moved to a deeper level. Photographs rest on the implicit claim that what they represent was actually presented before the camera's impersonal eye. We know consciously that this is not the case. The famous photograph of the Cottingley fairies, which notoriously duped Conan Doyle, is a case in point. But it is the nature of the photographic image that the whole gravitational direction of our viewing is geared towards trust. We can't help doing it.
The press is now full of "doctored" images, manipulated into something that often bears an unclear relationship to the original. Most of this is relatively benign, done for visual effect - though we may recall the fuss that erupted when wheelchair spectators were excised from a football photograph, or the furore that greeted the Guardian's decision, against its usual editorial policy, to filter out a gory detail from a photograph of the Madrid train bombings.
When the stakes of visual truth are higher, the construction of a manipulated or entirely confected reality is altogether a more serious matter. We need an open commitment to "real photography" from the public media. I know that there is no such thing as "real photography" in the absolute sense, but it can stand as an ethical goal in the face of our many virtual realities.
