About FoundView  — a note by VM

The FoundView movement is officially dead and replaced by TrustImage.

The FoundView movement started in response to the ease of digital manipulation of photographic images, after the digital tehechnology became widely available to the photographers in the last years of the 20th century. At the time, the use of said technology and its possible negative consequences to the world of photography were hotly discussed.

FoundView attempted to separate digitally manipulated images (or digital art) from photographs, and provided a way to label the latter as such. On the one hand, the initiative was met with scepticism from many photographers and artists who believed the labeling was an artificial measure and no such deliniation was possible. On the other hand, FoundView was accepted by a limited number of photographers, and used by several on-line photo communities (notably by a few sites where nature photographers posted their images). Overally the movement, however, never became widespread.

The creators of FoundView apparently became disappointed with such a limited acceptance and other shortcomings of their standard. The site was closed in 2002, and the domain name foundview.org eventually slipped to an unrelated party.

Nevertheless I felt that FoundView represented the best attempt to study and solve the problem outlined above, and should be preserved as a valuable historical reference. Snapshots of all the pages were retrieved from the Internet Archive, and a copy of the site set up here on VM's photo pages in 2004. Another reason for doing this was that those who still used the FoundView mark for their works could link to this copy of the site.

As it later turned out, FoundView has been replaced by TrustImage. Micah Marty of trustimage.org has told me that if someone still has questions about FoundView, they could contact TrustImage (support@trustimage.org).

P.S. Personally, I mostly agreed with the FoundView position. The only trouble I had was with post-exposure perspective correction being disqualified (see F-3). Firstly, brain does perspective correction for us in most cases (even while you're looking through the viewfinder) while a lens records a view different from what the viewer perceives at the scene. Secondly, a properly done digital perspective correction is fully equivalent to using a much more expensive and heavy shift lens, or a wider-angle lens set up parallel to the ground with subsequent cropping (except that the resolution of the final image may vary a bit depending on the method). Anyway, my own photographs could not be collectively labeled FoundView because of this one.

• TrustImage —
  ...(I) thought you'd be interested to learn that "FoundView" became trustimage.org. It may not meet your needs any more than FoundView did (because it does not allow for ANY post-shutter changes to forms and shapes — not for perspective correction, or for motion blur, or for any other reason). However, the philosophy is the same as before, and trustimage.org may be worth a look just because it's the largest web site in the world dealing with issues of photo manipulation.
  ...I'm playing TrustImage pretty low key for now; I'll have two books coming out in about a year featuring TrustImage photos and expect it might get a little more attention then — but I think the photography world still is not quite ready for it. Even if no one else uses it, however, I will, and that makes it worth it for me.
  — added by Micah Marty (site author; Micahmarty@aol.com) on November 19, 2004