----- Original Message ----- From: "T Rittenhouse" Subject: Re: PDN article
> And from my point of view he did nothing that changed the meaning of the > photographs. Getting rid of a distracting background is a long long way from > cloning in someone who wasn't there. I think this is all coming about > because people are now buying digital cameras. Almost all of them come with > some kind of digital editing software so people are becoming aware that > things like this are possible. In the past they kind of thought that a > photographer had no more control over the content of their pictures that the > consumer did over his snapshots. That never was true. The problem is that this sort of thing becomes the thin edge of the wedge. You start by making a little tweak here, a bit of a clone there, and as time goes on you find yourself routinely making alterations to content. And suddenly, you are no longer a news photographer but a visual editorialist, probably still passing your fictionalized images off as news. You start posing people and calling the image "news", or you take several images and paste them together to make a "news" picture. Perhaps there is no harm in this if it is done innocently, or to make a picture have more impact without altering the news value (the Brian Walski image from Iraq that got him fired is a pretty good example of editorializing that causes no real harm). But where do you draw the line? Do you draw it at no editorializing? Just a bit? And who decides if the content has effectively changed? If a picture of George Bush fornicating a goat is run in an Arab newspaper, is it news or is it editorial? What if it makes it to the New York Times? It's hard enough to believe news photos these days because of the amount of image massaging that is done with long focal length lenses taking things out of context and journalists with Stockholm Syndrome passing off their tripe from the front lines as news without having to add in the question about whether anything in the picture had a relationship to each other at the moment the picture was taken. Allowing any removal or addition of image details, whether they "matter" to the image or not makes a mockery out of what is already pretty much a sham. > > To me the line is when you do something that changes the meaning of a > photograph. Editing for impact is in my mind just part of the photographic > process. Just a couple of weeks ago you were all trying to get Boris in > trouble by telling him to clone out that trash can <grin>. To stay serious, if Boris was passing the image off as a news photo, then the cloning out of the garbage can would be wrong, if it is an editorial or art photo, then that is a different thing completely. We have to hold journalists to a very high ethical standard, because they are often the people who sway public opinion. Either what they choose to cover, or how they choose to cover it can cause some pretty major events to happen. Would the bombing of Iraq have happened if CNN had mocked the entire concept of Saddam having weapons of mass destruction? Would the American public have allowed the war to happen if the news media had been broadcasting that GWB was bald faced lying to them about his reasons for wanting to wage a war? For myself, I have more respect for the American public than that. I am pretty sure if they had known that there was a lot of fabrication going on, and that their President was being spoon fed a bill of goods to sway him into doing something, they would have demanded some accountability up front before they put their son's and daughter's lives on the line. We'll never know, though, since the media saw a huge opportunity to make lots of money and ratings. War is big business for more than the people that make guns, tanks and uranium tipped shells. It's a huge industry that will make a lot of money for anyone that can jump on the wagon and go downtown with it. Froth up a story, give it a spin to strike fear into the hearts of the masses, and boom bang, you suddenly have a nice little war that you can make tons of money with. The only losers are the soldiers who get injured or die as part of the thing, and a bunch of rag headed foreigners who no one over here give a damn about anyway. This is how news works nowadays, and quite frankly, I find it quite disgusting that the news media wants these things to happen as badly as the companies that make tanks and bullets, and is willing to manipulate not only the general public, but the people who make the decisions about who gets to live, and who gets the shit bombed out of them. Sorry for the rant, and it wasn't meant to be an anti anyone diatribe (except possibly the puss heads at CNN) William Robb
