observational note
"Meet world-renowned wildlife and culture photographer, author, and TV show host, Art Wolfe. Art is the 2025 recipient of the The Mountaineers Adventure with Purpose Award. This award is the highest honor given by The Mountaineers and will be presented to Art at the Annual Gala taking place on April 26."
https://www.mountaineers.org/blog/mountaineer-of-the-week-art-wolfe
Unless you've been living under more than a rock for the last 30 years, that guy needs no introduction. Incredible body of work. Super notable figure. The Mountaineers are a for real, venerable org, not some trustafarian tax shelter, and don't hand stuff like this out to numpty enthusiasts like me.
And so maybe its petty, or unfair, given the distance of time, to trot the horse bones out and flog them again, but because right now, in 2025, we're facing a literal invasion of the unreal, it is, I think, germane to point out that back in 1998, some rando named Brower -- I dunno, dad started some weirdo nature club or something -- said what needed to be about the subject at the time, in an extensive three-part essay published in The Atlantic (which used to be, you know, really, really good).
Excerpted from the Atlantic's May 1998 issue, from Kenneth Brower's "Photography in the Age of Falsification"
"Photofakery is pernicious to natural history. Lemmings do not commit suicide, either individually or en masse from cliffs -- Darwin and common sense forbid it. Yet thanks to Disney, several generations of Americans believe that lemmings do. Only elephants can pull off an authentic migration of elephants. A photographer may have spent his life observing elephants, and may believe that he knows their habits well, but when he begins cloning his own herds, error and falseness will inevitably creep in.
"Over the years, as I reviewed the material," Art Wolfe writes in the introduction to Migrations, "I often had to pass over photographs because in a picture of masses of animals invariably one would be wandering in the wrong direction, thereby disrupting the pattern I was trying to achieve. Today the ability to digitally alter this disruption is at hand."
Wandering in the wrong direction according to whom? Whose patterns is the nature photographer supposed to celebrate -- nature's or his own? In the human herd that animal wandering in the wrong direction would be the Buddha, or Luther, or Einstein. We generally regard these rogues and erratics as among the more interesting features of the big picture, and human history cannot be related without reference to them. Animals turned in the wrong direction are a truth of nature. If anything, they validate the pattern, as exceptions that prove the rule. The accidental and the unpredictable are vital to art. Without those elements art becomes boring. Reversing the contrary animal is wrongheaded, not only journalistically but also artistically.
Photofakery is pernicious to conservation. Photographers -- along with poets, painters, astronauts, reporters -- are a sensing element for humanity. The public increasingly depends for much of its environmental awareness on photographic images from around the world. These images need to be true. Zoo cheetahs, when subjected to digital fertility treatments and freed on a virtual savanna, can spawn huge litters, but real African cheetahs are in desperate reproductive trouble, their populations reduced to the point that inbreeding and its genetic consequences threaten their survival.
Digital photofakery creates problems for photographers who choose to shoot straight. Manufactured serendipity is so much quicker and easier than the genuine kind.
Digital photofakery is likely to be pernicious also, in the long run, to the continued good will of photography's audience. Photography and the public have an unusual compact. "The camera does not lie" is a proposition that most of us know to be false yet we half believe anyway. This is a dynamic unique in the arts. The "willing suspension of disbelief" that Coleridge detected at the heart of poetic faith becomes in photographic faith a nearly automatic suspension. Once betrayed, this sort of uncomplicated belief goes quickly past willing to unwilling. Art Wolfe's Migrations is the perfect example. The book is briefly entertaining as a "Where's Waldo?" exercise. Finding the reduplicated zebras on the book's cover requires a close attention to stripes, forcing one to appreciate as never before the wonderful painting on zebras. But soon one is just searching for Waldo and ceases to see wildlife. Interest evaporates as the pages are turned. Halfway through I found I did not want to look at the pictures anymore. Wolfe's defense -- that the book is not natural history but art -- does not wash. The title is Migrations, the subject is wild animals on the march, the text is natural history. The point of the book is not the artful composition of the images but the multitudes in them. Those multitudes are inflated and fake.
In Biographia Literaria, along with his famous observation on the willing suspension of disbelief, Coleridge listed "the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by modifying colors of imagination." In the digital doctoring of photographs these two cardinal points have come into conflict."
Emphasis mine. And yeah, this is ancient history now. An entire ship full of genie lamps has sailed, the sailors have rubbed them all up, and the genies are running amok. A guy made a professional creative decision. It was well and duly critiqued. The world has moved on. Okay. But, in order to better understand where we're going, and make better choices about it, its informative to know where we've been. Brower's pointed assertion is just as much -- if not very much moreso -- a fact now, as it was then.
