Some time ago, I received a colorized photo from an online acquaintance. His great-grandfather and my great-great-uncle had served in the same British regiment together. The photo was his great-grandfather's wedding picture. The groom was standing proudly in his red dress uniform while his bride was seated in a lovely wedding dress holding a bouquet of flowers. My friend is a graphic artist and works in the photography business. He had done a magnificent job colorizing the black and white picture. Only the bride and groom were in color; the background of the picture was still in black and white.

Because parts of the photo were still in their original format, it was clear that the photograph had been colorized. But I started to think about how our modern tools for digitally manipulating pictures might be changing the way we view photographs in our family album. What if my friend had colorized the entire photo and not mentioned the fact to me? Would I have been able to determine that the photo was not a faithful representation of the photograph in its original form? On a greater scale, will the use of photo manipulation tools provide false images to future generations who might assume these images were not changed? What are the ethics of modifying family photographs when used as pictorial evidence in our genealogy research?

Trick of the Light
Photographic trickery is as old as photography itself. Photographers have always been able to change the composition of a picture in the dark room. Retouching and double exposures have been possible but have required technical expertise and special equipment.

Photo manipulation has a long history. Photographers have always staged their formal portraits of individuals by adding props or backdrops. Formal portraits were usually made with subjects wearing their Sunday best rather than their everyday work clothes. Thus the clothes, the props, and the backgrounds in historic photos may not truly represent how the subjects dressed, what tools they used, or what environment they lived in. Painting directly onto a finished photograph was also popular before color photography. One of my own family photographs shows an example of a suit and tie being painted over a photograph for one ancestor who most likely never owned a suit and tie.

So even though the manipulation of photographs is not new, it's an issue today because graphics software has become so commonplace. Gone are the days when a computer user had to spend several hundred dollars for Photoshop ® or even $100 for Paint Shop Pro ® . Now, easy-to-use graphics programs such as Paint and Paintbrush actually come with operating systems. Add a digital camera or a scanner and the modern computer user can be drawing purple mustaches on Aunt Gertrude in no time at all.

Computer modifications can make a digital image indistinguishable from the original. Photographs can be made lighter and brighter, sharpened, and given more contrast. Color photographs can be manipulated to remove red eye and water spots, digitally crop and rotate, and repair other damage. Digital images do not have negatives that act as a reference for what was actually captured by the photo.

The Red Eye
Just because we can manipulate family photographs does not mean that we should. This is an ethics issue that users of graphics software must bear in mind. To give a simple example, removing red eye from a digital color photograph seems innocuous enough. The red eye itself is an effect from the camera's flash and not a part of the actual scene. However, if the red eye is removed, what color replaces the red? Is it automatically filled in by the graphics software? Is it the user's best guess at the correct eye color? Will future generations have a mistaken image of the subject because the eye color was improved?

What about more complex digital manipulations such as the colorization of the wedding photo discussed earlier? The uniform color of the tunic is historically well documented. Appropriate research would produce a very close match for the groom's uniform. However, the color of the bride's gown and flowers must be more speculative. When adding color to a black and white photo, how can the manipulator know if the colors represent the original scene?

Outfits and bouquets are not the only colorization issue. What about skin tone? This is an issue that has drawn national attention in the press. The 24 June 1994 cover of Time shows the mugshot photo of O.J. Simpson. However, it had been manipulated to make Simpson's skin darker, his face more blurry, and his chin unshaven. The same week, Newsweek showed the actual mugshot photo of a much less menacing Simpson with actual skin tone, clean shaven, and in focus. Magazine readers were not informed that Time had manipulated the photograph. Should a family historian ever colorize or change existing colors in existing photographs to suit his or her own needs? Should a researcher change hair, eye, or skin color to make a child look more like his or her adoptive parents? Should a family historian darken the skin of an old photograph of a Caucasian ancestor to make him or her appear more consistent with their primarily African ancestry?

The potential for manipulation does not end at the color palette. Individuals can be digitally removed from group photographs. Consider the potential for divorce within families and the desire to “forget” a former family member. Besides plucking out the ex, new bodies and faces may be added as well. A quick cut-and-paste job and a great-great-grandfather can be standing in a group photo from a 2003 family picnic.

People aren't the only things to come and go in the digital manipulation of photographs. An ancestor proudly posing with his hunting rifle can be made to hold a fishing rod by a descendant who disapproves of firearms. Or, a picture of an ancestor attending a rally of a now-discredited political movement can be cropped to a simple portrait of his face.

Through the Viewfinder Darkly
Should a family photograph be digitally manipulated? The answer depends on the purpose. If the manipulation is an attempt to clean, sharpen, or otherwise make more viewable a treasured photograph, the software is easily available now and should be utilized. Ask yourself why you are changing the photograph. How will viewers interpret the manipulated photo? How would they interpret it without your manipulation? Will viewers recognize that the photo has been manipulated? If current or future viewers might be confused or misled by your manipulation, don't do it.

If the desire to manipulate a family photograph cannot be resisted, there are two options that will assist future generations in ferreting out your changes. First, make the manipulation obvious. My friend colorized the subjects but left backgrounds and other objects in the original black and white so it was clear that it had been manipulated.

Second, digitally label manipulated images. The graphics program you use for manipulation will allow you to label the photo in an unobtrusive spot on the image. “Original image sharpened, colorized, and cropped by Mic L. Angelo in 2003” in digital text right on the image would be a good start. Just like using clear references to secondary source citations in textual research, family photographs should be labeled as such if they do not represent the original view. Digitally recording the changes directly on the image will help ensure that wherever the modified image travels in time and space, future generations stand a good chance of knowing that it is not the original.

Mark Howells plays with pixels at markhow@oz.net.

Return to the May/June 2003 Table of Contents.