Photography and Photoshop

The images of both insane asylum patients and electro-shocked people displaying emotions that we saw during our trip to Cambridge provide an interesting insight into how Victorians viewed the new technology of photography. These pictures were presented as scientifically accurate because they were seen to provide a more instantaneous and life-like display than could have been provided by hand-drawings. Although with a fairly small sample size, Darwin used the photos of the electrically contorted man to test responses of dinner guests in order to determine the universality of emotional conception. Interestingly, when Darwin conducted the survey through contacts abroad, there were no photos involved but instead only a series of questions about how the people changed their expression while experiencing different emotions. While this was probably due more to the practical issues of printing and posting dozens of photos than to Darwin’s actual wishes, the detail that the questions provide demonstrate that Darwin would have liked to provide a photo. Descriptions of emotional expression are much more easily conveyed through images than words, and Darwin placed much trust in these images. Similar scientific uses of photography can be seen in the work done by the French psychiatrist Charcot, who would photograph his patients in various stages of their hysterical fits. In both cases, the scientists present the photos as infallible.
By contrast to the Victorian confidence in their new technology, in the twenty-first century we have taken a much more skeptical view to photography. We are quick to denounce anything incredible to a trick of the mind and the mouse. With a few clicks, Photoshop and airbrushing can take any image and alter it almost to the point of being unrecognizable. In the public arena, what we are looking at is rarely what the photographer was seeing. Thus, we have gained a cynicism regarding commercial photography which has slipped into our scientific images as well. One can surely remember looking through images in a text book or paper and wondering that they could possibly be real. A biology text book certainly provides many opportunities for the photography skeptic to criticize.
Still, maybe the Victorians could have used some of our cynicism. It has been questioned whether the scientific photos in which Darwin placed so much faith were not actually staged. The man who is most prominent in the series who claimed to be a subject because he was not pained by the electrodes has been said to be acting to a certain extent. The true question becomes, however, whether this was a nineteenth century criticism or a twenty-first. The difference lies in the faith in technology.