Insta...gem?

Not a day goes by when I look at my Facebook news feed and someone hasn't uploaded a very artistically shot Instagram photo of the sandwich they are about to eat.

Yesterday, for example, it was a shot of coffee by a friend. Not as in an espresso; but as in a photographic shot of a cup of coffee. A cup of coffee that he hadn't even made himself, and therefore had no particular right to be proud about. It was a pure boast: this is what I have and am about to enjoy; despite the fact that I did nothing much to make it worthwhile (excuse the rant!)

A couple of days ago it was someone uploading a photo of a beach - again, purely to inspire jealousy. The comment with it was “I'm going to miss being here when I'm back in the office like you guys next week”. I know the beach, it's nothing particularly spectacular. Catch it on a good day and it has its aspects; on a bad day and it is gloomy and unremitting.

But Instagram has proliferated widely, and why? Well it's the filters that make practically every photo look amazing. Ish.

You know, the filters that enhance all of the colours so that the blues are bluer than you've ever seen, the hazy soft-focus (or just plain blur) around the edges, the sepia wash or aged-grain effect that are supposed to be redolent of rose-tinted yesteryears. Take the beach - apply the 'vivid' filter and it makes a dull beach amazing; apply a different filter and it could make exactly the same picture look spooky, or grainy, a hundred years old or as though the sun is just setting.

The irony is that with the most recent update, the 'live filters' have been removed, and you can only apply them 'post-production'. The founder of instagram doesn't see the application as a photograph manipulation tool, he sees it as a social network. It isn't a program to take photos and apply filters, it is a facility to share photos with your network of friends.

But how much of the picture is yours?

You have taken the time to properly compose the picture, to stand in the correct place and frame it correctly, to time the click just right...

And then you use a processor to apply a filter, altering the focus, the colours, cropping out the bits that you don't want in there. Where is the skill, other than clicking on the correct filter?

It's a question that has bugged me for a while, and it isn't exclusively digital either.

Where do you go if you want a family portrait? A modern, crisp, minimalist family portrait? You go to Venture Photography, where all the photos look the same. Pure ethereal, white backgrounds, no shadows, vivid colours with some picked out to be more vibrant than others. (They do simple black and white photos as well, but still no shadows). And obviously a little airbrushing thrown in, just in case you had a spot that day.

But how reflective of truth is it? And how reflective of the truth should it be? And - of course, one of my favourite subjects - how much of it is 'art'?

As I said with the 'beach' photo and the thirteen or so different photographs that the same shot could be, to what degree is the choice of filter an artistic choice? If you had a great degree of control over exactly how 'vivid' each particular colour is, and essentially spend a lot of time repainting the image, then I can see that - despite the digital intervention - it is still user-generated art.

This is no new question though. Image manipulation has gone back hundreds of years. If we look at photography, colour was a manipulation. Originally it was black and white. Even then, the level of contract would vary depending upon the film and the development. With colour photos, part of the reason some of them have the washed-out tones is because the development process employed did not accurately reproduce the colours taken. This was not an artistic intervention, but usually because of the technology available at the time to produce the pigments. To what extent do unmanipulated photographs these days accurately capture the colours? Afterall, when I turn on my digital camera there are a couple of dozen settings depending on whether I need high-resolution, low-light, high-speed, dusky conditions or others. I software in the camera itself then enhances the required aspects.

But long before the software did it, we were manipulating the aspects. Flash was around to ensure that a picture could be taken at a time when pictures otherwise should not be taken - inside or otherwise too dark. Henry VIII often instructed his portraitists and artists to paint him taller, broader, more ruddy and more impressive.

These days we go further. Obviously there are the 'pure' artistic considerations: composition of the scene; positioning and pose; and framing to crop the image. Then there are the 'external', yet still 'pre-production' elements: the lighting or filters, make-up etc. There may be some post-production additional articles added that weren't there in the original shot, or a bit of airbrushing or filtering or contrast or colour manipulation.

Like I say, I see this entirely where a considerable degree of skill and effort has been undertake by the person. but where it is just a couple of clicks to apply a filter? Or to airbrush out a spot (we've all been there)? I have had a similar discussion on art generally.

Of course, there are occasions where such manipulation is an absolute no. There have been numerous occasions in recent years of photo-journalists being sacked or having their reputation torn to pieces because of how they have composed a piece, Photoshopped two separate aspects together, even simply cropping the photo too short to remove a key element. But these are where we have a particular expectation that the image will be pure, unadulterated and a fair representation of the truth. But then photo-journalists don't go around taking photos with Instagram. Or at least not for publication. The Wikipedia article contains various references, although it seems to focus on digital manipulation and not on 'mock-up' images such as those used by The Mirror) which purported to be of abuses carried out by the armed forces in Iraq.

It's going to be one of those questions that doesn't go away - a matter of fact and degree, the blur between fact and fiction. Where the distortion or manipulation exceeds the original input, then clearly the 'art' is owned by the computer rather than the user, but it is the grey spectrum in the middle where people will draw their own line, or may only encounter that line when something comes so close to crossing it.

And I'm sure, wherever they have drawn the line, I will probably perceive that as wrong.