The New York Times Magazine ran a photo essay last Sunday by Edgar
Martins titled "Ruins of the Second Gilded Age." But on Wednesday, the
Times published this editor's note:
"A picture essay in The Times Magazine on Sunday and an expanded slide
show on NYTimes.com entitled 'Ruins of the Second Gilded Age' showed
large housing construction projects across the United States that came
to a halt, often half-finished, when the housing market collapsed. The
introduction said that the photographer, a freelancer based in
Bedford, England, "creates his images with long exposures but without
digital manipulation."
A reader, however, discovered on close examination that one of the
pictures was digitally altered, apparently for aesthetic reasons.
Editors later confronted the photographer and determined that most of
the images did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show.
Had the editors known that the photographs had been digitally
manipulated, they would not have published the picture essay, which
has been removed from NYTimes.com."
The phrase here that I want to discuss is "the images did not wholly
reflect the reality they purported to show." The critical issue here
for newspaper photographs is that the photograph exactly and reliably
portrays the scene represented without "digital manipulations" and
other intentional alterations. ("Exactly," within the limitations of
scale, lighting, and other variable factors used by the photographic
process and equipment.)
Manipulating a photographic image would not be a damaging critique of
any photograph presented as a work of art, because the photographer is
free to construct the final image we see by any means at his disposal
and choice. The exact and literal correlation to a single or unitary
outside referent is not a concern when viewing an "art" photograph.
But it is a concern when viewing a photograph presented as a
journalistic or reportorial image. By tacit agreement, a news
photograph has to show what was before the camera without unannounced
alterations by the photographer.
This is a paradigm example of what I mean by asserting that
ascertaining whether the work "is true" or whether that question does
not apply comes first. In this case of journalistic photography, all
of the other photographic qualities--lighting, angle, sharpness of
focus, etc.--are subordinate to the literal reliability of the
representation.
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Michael Brady
[email protected]
http://considerthepreposition.blogspot.com/
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