Chris Reynolds Photography: December 2009

Some think that there should be a law having any retouched photos in magazines carry a label saying that it has been retouched. This is ridiculous. Photography is art, and art is a free form of expression. You don't tell painters not to paint something, you don't tell writers that they cannot write about something, and you should not tell photographers what they can or can't do with their photographs. Furthermore, all other art-forms are fantasy. Writers write about unrealistically beautiful people all the time, painters paint people and make them look unrealistically beautiful. Unless you are doing journalism, photography is not about being realistic, it is about creating fantasy, no matter how real the fantasy may appear. If girls are starving themselves because they see a lot of skinny looking women in magazines, it is not the artist's fault, it is the girls. If someone reads the Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe and then commits suicide because the main character did, their family cannot blame Goethe, because Goethe was not trying to illustrate reality, nor are photographers when they take fashion photographs. People should not need to see a label to realize that fashion photography is a fiction, that they are trying to sell an image, a dream rather than what the clothes or models actually look like. Art is the pursuit of perfection, and if there are girls trying to mimic these artificially perfect people, then they have lost the battle before it has even begun.

Who is the author of a photograph?

This question is too varied to answer specifically, as the answer is completely conditional. For example, there could be a photograph where someone takes a picture of nature, downloads it, edits it, then publishes it to a website without any help from anyone else. In that case, that person would be the author of the photograph. In any instance, the model is not the author, because the model is simply a puppet of the photographer's imagination, doing what the photographer wants. However, there are some cases, particularly involving candid shots, where the model would be partially the author, because even the the photographer pressed down on the shutter-release, the photographer had nothing to do with the way that the scene was set up, so the picture in way created itself, the models creating the image unconsciously, and the photographer merely documenting what would have happened with or without him/her. The author does not have to be the actual photographer however, because there are instances where the photographer will set up the shot, but not actually press the shutter-release, but they are still the author. There are also some situations in which there is no definite author, where the photo goes through edits by other people and photoshopping by other people, just as books go through edits by other people, and in that case, one author may receive the credit, but in reality there is no definite author.