Bazin and Photoshop

Bazin’s “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” furthers the claim that photography “saved” the plastic arts when it was invented, as photography freed the visual arts from its aspiration towards realism. Bazin states that photography and cinema satisfy our obsession with realism and argues that photography is formed without the creative intervention of man. However, Susan Sontag states in her essay “On Photography” that “to photograph is to exclude,” implying that the mere act of photographing a scene rejects its objectivity as it excludes other information through the cropping of a scene. Bazin then tries to make the argument that photography represents an objective “proof,” even if drawings or other artworks offer more information than the photograph itself.

Bazin’s argument about the objectivity of photography would be hard to uphold in our digital contemporary society. With countless apps and software able to distort the truth in images, photography no longer holds the complete objectivity that it did when the photographic process was first developed. Even when he wrote this piece there were ways of manipulating photographs, such as utilizing mutiple negatives to create one single image.

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