Afterword

Abstract

In 2008, with the intention of demonstrating its advanced weapons capability, the Iranian state released publicity photographs of a rocket launch. The release did not go as planned, however, as it soon became clear that one of the images had been faked. The government had used a computer program to copy-and-paste an additional rocket into one of the pictures.¹ Parodies soon appeared online: rockets being drawn in by pencil, caught in the hands of ‘Uncle Sam’, attacked by a gigantic kitten, and the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote sheltering from a missile attack beneath a small parasol.² The critique implicit in these memes was not simply that Iran had used fake images in its propaganda. Instead, the mockery focused on the idea that Iran ‘sucked at Photoshop’.³ This response indicates a widespread cultural assumption, perhaps even an expectation, that contemporary photographs might be digitally enhanced.⁴ It suggests that the quality of a digital photograph — even perhaps its authenticity — depends upon the photographer’s ability to produce genuine-looking simulacra, rather than on what Roland Barthes termed ‘the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens’, which would, in his view, allow the viewer to know ‘That-has-been’.⁵ Photography’s previously obscured theatrical tradition, present in the illustrations for London Labour and the London Poor, has now found its place within an emergent digital culture in which performance and staging are accepted parts of making (rather than ‘taking’) an image.⁶ In a reversal of Kodak’s old catchphrase, it seems increasingly common for someone else to take the picture and for us to do the rest.