Image Ambiguity in Contemporary Era
Faizan Adil
Independent Scholar, Pakistan
Abstract
This enquiry delves into an investigation of whether a photograph, due to its ambiguous nature, can be fabricated by removing or adding accompanying text, changing its placement, or editing, retouching, altering, or distorting it. This paper examines the art of photo-editing and manipulation both in the historical and contemporary context to assess the exploitative impact of photography in the form of spreading mistruths, distortion of facts, and propagating false narratives. I further investigate the ethics of contemporary photographs and photojournalism to see how the visual medium has evolved by not only becoming more accessible but also by providing easy access to several manipulation tools. Furthermore, to describe the application of ambiguous photographs in the contemporary era, this paper relies on Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s “Propaganda Model” theory (Chomsky & Herman, 1988).
Keywords: Propaganda Model, Ethical Photojournalism, Photomanipulation, Doctored Images