Another Example of Photo Manipulation

Here's another very interesting thing I learned in class last night....

There's a famous photographer named Edward Curtis, who in the first 3 decades of the 20th century created more than 40,000 images of Native Americans. His work is often thought to represent the "last days" of the Plains Indians' more traditional ways of life. This is his image An Oasis in the Bad Lands from 1905.

The documentary interviewed several Native Americans who acknowledge the power of Curtis's images, but revealed that they really were a lie. While many wished that he was depicting the true culture of the time, showing images of a culture with such beauty and dignity, he was actually manipulating them all from the very start.

As he was taking pictures, Curtis traveled with trunks full of costumes and props. If a subject or a scene that he wanted to photograph didn't look "Indian enough," he would dress them up in whatever he had on hand. If Native American children were playing with bats and baseballs, he would trade them for sticks. If an elder was wearing modern-style clothing, he would make them change into a headdress or buckskin to achieve the image he wanted.

While his photographs are still beautiful aesthetically, they do not show a true slice of life for Native Americans. Yet for generations since, they have come to define the culture. His images are very well known -- I'd seen many of them before, and I know that for me as well as probably for most others who saw them they definitely contributed to what my own view of Native American culture was and had been.

So herein lies a classic example of the ethical dilemma of photography -- if the viewer believes that an image is depicting something real when it has actually been manipulated, is the image a lie? Does that discount its value as an artistic work? My view is it depends on what the photographer's purpose was -- was he working as a photojournalist or as an artist? What do you think?