Image integrity: what is real and what lengths should we go to?

In response to a growing conundrum about image authenticity, recently Leica released the M11p , a mid-cycle variant on the M11 camera I already own. I did wonder what this new release would bring to an already outstanding camera. Apart from a few very small tweaks, the main selling point was introduction of? an image provenance feature which encrypts metadata using a Content Authenticity Initiative, thus making it easier to prove the credentials of an image. It sounds like a kind of crypto block chain scenario, where a digital certificate backs the claims to the image authenticity, and laying bare what has been done to the metadata.

What a curious problem we have inherited- such is the pervasiveness of digital photography and its bedfellow, retouching (now significantly aided by advances in AI), we our now having trouble knowing what is real. We can no longer trust photography, or anything really.

Im not surprised Leica has responded to this. The Leica brand is associated with legendary work (look here , here and here ) delivering some of the most famous and thought-provoking images of all time. Behind the modern consumer luxury layering of the Leica enigma, there is a pulse that has been beating deeply in the veins of photographic vernacular, and there’s a reason, beyond merely optics, that sees a legion of professionals like myself increasingly aligning with the Leica brand and what it promises: purer photography.

My response to the the issue of image provenance, or more pacifically, addressing the extent to which we can trust and admire what we see, sparked some huge changes to my practice in 2019, when after 15 years of shooting digitally, I invested in a Leica film camera (because it's an unbreakable tank and the brand aligns itself with romanticists like me) and began shooting what has amounted to a couple of hundred rolls of black and white film. I didn’t stop there though. I went to large (4x5) and larger (8x10) formats and became completely obsessed by the beauty of silver halides on a fibre print- its nuanced rendering of tone, its granular edges, chemical anomalies. Then there was the print itself. What a delight it has been for me to master the art of printing, where I gain a far deeper familiarity with what I have shot, and create a legitimate tangible image that is held in the hands or framed on our gallery wall.

A few years into my photographic renaissance (I founded Platina Editions , launched a packed solo show at Ditty Wheels , then took the work to Sydney Contemporary 2023), I bought an M11: a rangefinder digital Leica with similar mechanical simplicity as my Leica film camera (well almost). It's a 60ish megapixel digital chip housed in a Magnesium manually focused rangefinder shell.

I wont wax lyrical about this new digital setup, suffice to say that it goes some way to approximating (but never fulfilling) the Film experience. However there's a downside.

Once an image is in front of me on a screen, the tinker-temptation reflex is strong.

My first dilemma is choosing how to express the image: colour versus black and white. When I shoot Tri-x film, I commit to the lack of colour and embrace the challenge of monochromatic tonality. But with the digital cousin, shot as a colour file, I have too many decisions at my disposal, too much experience with retouching, and too little to overcome. Hence my creative balloon deflates and the life too easily leaks out of my work. Art is made at the boundaries where things are overcome. Photography also flourishes when it is grounded on something we trust.

My biggest problem is this one of provenance, or legitimacy. How do I install a sense of trust from my audience when nothing they see anymore is real??

I address this internally by using the digital camera for colour, avoiding black-and-white conversions, and I shoot the real stuff on the film cameras. I strive to only make crops on the colour files , and refrain from actually retouching anything. For my film work, I don’t scan the film (again, the slippery slope of tinkering, plus too many forks in the road affecting the classic feel of the film itself) rather, I make hand 5x7 inch black and white prints in my darkroom, do all the dodging and burning I need there, then simply make a print that honours the integrity of this image (ie a straight scan of the print). The prints I'm getting now are becoming increasingly beautiful in and of themselves.

Most people think Im nuts. Ive had so many conversations with others (purists and otherwise) who shake their heads at my mental gymnastics. That’s fine. We all have our own ways of working.

But I'm so proud of the way my work looks now, and that for me makes all the difference. Plus you can trust what I shoot, even If I don’t yet have a Content-Authenticity-Initative watermark to prove it. My mark is my work.

If anyone wants to delve deeper into my process, I'm always happy to share what Im doing, hit me up.

(Christopher Ireland moves people with photography. Click here to be moved. )