the memory hole



   1984 is one of my favorite books. It's where the whole "Big Brother" concept originated; but in fact the concept is more than just the idea of some larger faceless entity watching over your every move. The scariest part of the concept is that Big Brother defines what truth is.
   How? Simply by having the power to modify the past as needed. Through insidious mental conditioning all the members of "The Party" believe anything that Big Brother claims has happened in the past. Part of maintaining this conditioning is the destruction of any records that might indicate that Big Brother has not always been right. Introducing: the memory hole.
   The memory hole is essentially a trash receptacle/incinerator located near your desk, sink, couch, bed... By destroying any record of what actually was, there is no evidence left to contradict the memories imposed by Big Brother. Truly an appropriate phenomenon for the truncated cliché: "Those who forget the past are doomed <activate truncation!>..."
   The subject of this post is actually not said book. It's the practice of modifying photographs. I'm no art historian, but I suspect that photography (starting with chiaroscuro) was initally a means of recording the state of the world. That seems to make sense in light of old-timey portraits where people did not smile. Why wouldn't they smile? Perhaps because they didn't feel like smiling at the time, so why record something different from how it actually was?
   I further conjecture that as artistic photography became more and more prevalent, it became more and more fashionable to tweak the recording between when it was made and the final print. Examples for film include solarizations, dodging and burning, multiple exposures, and composite images (à la Scott Mutter). In the digital photography era almost everyone with a camera has some type of image editor.
   I'm not complaining about this (though I think it's a fun question to ponder: why are we so prone to manipulate a record of what was?). In fact, almost all of my photos are modified in some way or another, though usually just for overall brightness, contrast, and cropping. However, of late I've been thoroughly enjoying the practice of "cloning out" significant image elements from the original image. Lots of people do this, and most of them can do it better than I can, but here's a quick example:



This is after the cloning operation; can you tell where I worked my magic?
The original is shown a little bit further down the page.


   It almost makes me giddy to think about the power I wield with some free software and a mouse. In fact, some of my colleagues have photoshopped the people they were with out of pictures! This seems like a more flagrant use of the memory hole than simply cleaning up a scene by removing random passersby and background clutter. But it's kind of interesting to imagine a scenario where someone forgets that a person actually was at a place or event - and then never have the reminder of that fact!
   So another recreational photo-manipulation effort of mine is here, shown in the obvious before/after format (make sure your window is wide enough to fit them side-by-side or face the awkwardness of misalignment):

      

See how much prettier the leaves are when you selectively de-activate the cones on your retinas?

   Yup, that took some effort to select and delete a lot of area in the modified layer - especially if you consider the narrow color gamut spanned in this image. It's not nearly perfect, but at small sizes it looks pretty good in my opinion.
   Ok, so now the original garden picture with the people left in:



Again, I'm no expert, but especially at web-browser size,
I'd say I did a decent job! What do you think?

   I hope this has brought another dimension to art photography for you: no longer is a photographer simply manipulating color, contrast, and composition--she is also altering the records of the past. Shoot carefully.






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