Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

The corporate photograph is often seen as an object of communication rather than one of truth, so staff photographs for the website aren’t usually approached with hypotheses about representing likeness or questions about vanity; your job as photographer is to make it work. Sitters just want the photos to look good. A loaded statement. They also want to see the image in the camera’s display in order to “approve” it before leaving it in your hands. A question about the photographer’s competence? To this digital photographer, the raw image is unfinished and imperfect. It must and will be edited. To this digital photographer as sitter, the raw image does not resemble the me in my head and therefore needs to be fixed. In either case… Photoshop. This paper therefore examines the process and visual construction of the Caribbean School of Media and Communication (CARIMAC) staff photographs (which includes the image of the photographer herself) using 3 elements: Lighting (with limited resources), Composition and Editing (specifically Frequency Separation) to show that these digitally mediated images, these objects of communication are artificial but none un-true.