Seeing is believing except when it isn't

Last week in class we discussed the power of photographs and the ease they are manipulated.  It's a natural instinct of ours to trust what we see and because photographs can so closely capture reality we tend to believe them.  In fact we tend to believe a picture over an eyewitness.  Memories can fade and people are fallible, but a picture is a picture, right?  That would be true except for one thing, it's people who take and can change photographs.

The picture above is one I took for my Photography 100 class here at Penn State Greater Allegheny in Spring 2009.  It's a picture of an abandoned Burger King in Olympia Shopping Center.  I was standing in the KFC parking lot at the time I took the picture.  The assignment was a type of treasure hunt where we took different pictures to fulfill different categories.  This picture was to fulfill the category of a picture that symbolized current life.  Because of the recession, especially at the time, I decided to take a picture of a closed business.  The above picture has had nothing done to it whatsoever, but did I manipulate it?  Yes, I did because I framed the shot.

This part of the assignment called for me to manipulate the above picture using Photoshop or something to make it completely different.  But instead I'll talk about the manipulation I did and let you decide whether the above photo is still truthful.  The story I wanted to tell was of a closed business.  On the day I took the picture there were two construction vehicles in the Burger King parking lot.  They were just out of frame to the right.  Why do that?  Well then you would see a closed business with two construction vehicles which would change the story.  The story then becomes one of hope.  Yeah, the business had closed but it was being rebuilt.  That wasn't the story I wanted to tell.

Did I lie or deceive?  You would think so at least until I pointed out that the KFC parking lot by the drive thru was fenced off in orange construction fencing.  The construction vehicles were therefore just parked in the BK lot to keep them out of the way.  They were really there to work on KFC, not BK.  KFC was (and still is) an operating business and they probably wanted to keep the disruption of construction to a minimum.  So the story I told with my picture was true and it would've been a deception to shift the frame right to show the construction vehicles even though they were there.  Just as an update 2 years later, the orange construction fencing at KFC is gone and so are the construction vehicles.  The BK building is still there and still empty.

Pictures even if it's straight from the camera are still manipulated because a person framed the picture.  Pictures represent reality but they are only a snapshot of reality because you never see what isn't in the frame.  How a photographer frames a picture is how they frame the story they want to tell and it's something we should always be aware of.