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"Unmasking Photo Opportunities, Cubistically

In a 1994 photograph we see U.S. soldiers invading Haiti, lying on the airport tarmac pointing their rifles at unseen enemies. The heroic image supports the claim of the U.S. government that it is invading to support democracy, liberating a neighboring country from a dictatorship.

The curious reader [of the future], however, might want to place the computer cursor on the image. Another photograph appears from beneath it; it is of the same scene but from another vantage point. U.S. soldiers are pointing their guns not at any potential enemy but at about a dozen photographers who, lined up in front of them, are photographing them. In fact, the photographers are the only ones doing any shooting."

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The Alteration Fallacy

There seems to be a generalized sense that digitally manipulated photographs do “not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show,” as the New York Times put it (see post below). On the other hand, photographs that are not digitally altered are thought to reflect that reality–the obverse reasoning which may be even more dangerous.

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For Greater Image Credibility

In my After Photography book I outline a number of ways to employ the digital image differently, including ways to be more explicit as to the origins and possible meanings of the image. Given the never-ending discussions about digital retouching and a growing disbelief as to the authenticity of the contemporary photograph, I will repeat two of them here:

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Photographic retouching exposed

April 29th, 2009

The issues surrounding photographic meaning, manipulation and Photoshop have been prominent recently (see my previous posts here and here, with some updates amongst the comments for each).

Via Fred Ritchin’s After Photography (see his 24 April post) comes news of a Swedish government project Girlpower dealing with sexism in advertising.

One element is a magazine cover where, step-by-step, you can un-do the manipulation of the model to see how the glamorous cover was produced. You can go through each of the twelve changes that have been made, and at the end click on a red button to see the complete before and after images.

We know it happens, but in this case, seeing is really believing.

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Photographic truth and Photoshop

April 17th, 2009

Photography’s anxiety about truth, manipulation and reality has been on show recently. In different ways and from different contexts, people have been asking: “how much Photoshop is too much”?

From the realm of fashion, French Elle is being celebrated for running a cover story in which the models photographs have not been ‘Photoshopped’ (thereby confirming, as I’ve noted previously, that digital manipulation is the norm in this visual domain).

From the world of photojournalism, blogs like 1854, PDNPulse and the Online Photographer (with a follow-up here) have been buzzing with the story of the Danish photographer Klavs Bo Christensen who was excluded from that country’s Picture of the Year competition for excessive colour manipulation of his Haiti story. Along with two others, Christensen was asked to submit his RAW files to the competition judges who felt that the colour in his photographs had been excessively saturated (their debate can be heard here), and removed his images from the competition as a result. Christensen was subsequently happy to have his files put on the web for comparison and discussion, thereby performing an important service to the photographic community.

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Photographic truth and manipulation

February 23rd, 2009

We know photographs can be false yet we want them to be true. Indeed, the desire for photographic veracity has persisted, perhaps even intensified, even as knowledge about image manipulation becomes more widespread.

Reflecting on the Oscar ceremonies, MediaGuardian has documented the widespread use of Photoshop to enhance celebrity photographs in fashion and gossip magazines. Every cover, says one media insider, has been altered to some degree, with some of these changes exposed in the “Photoshop Hall of Shame” and “Photoshop Disasters”. So common is the practice that when an October 2008 Newsweek cover of Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin was not airbrushed, conservative anchors on Fox television complained that this amounted to liberal bias. (Fox knew about the political power of such changes because it had earlier manipulated the photos of two New York Times journalists it wanted to discredit).

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New York Times Magazine Withdraws Altered Photo Essay

UPDATE, 5:57 p.m. ET: The New York Times has published a new editors' note about the altered photo essay that was published in Sunday's Times Magazine. The newspaper says "most of the images did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show." The note does not address which photos were altered, or whether the photographer misrepresented them to the editors. PDN has tried to reach Edgar Martins, the photographer, but has not heard from him. Here's the Times' 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."

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Danish Photoshop Debate Leads To Disqualification



By Donald R. Winslow
© 2009 News Photographer magazine

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK (April 13, 2009) – Ethical questions surrounding photojournalists' use of Photoshop in image processing is not a controversy confined to the American market. Currently the embroilment rages in Denmark, where at least one photojournalist has been disqualified from a contest because it's been determined that his image manipulation went too far.

Jens Tønnesen, the Webmaster for the Danish Union of Press Photographers, attended the National Press Photographers Association's NewsVideo Workshop in Norman, OK, last week where he told News Photographer magazine about the heated Photoshop debate that's going on back in Copenhagen.

"There's a big discussion of Photoshop in Denmark these days because a photographer got disqualified from the Danish version of 'Pictures of the Year,'" Tønnesen told News Photographer magazine. Tønnesen had written about the squabble on the Pressefotografforbundet Web site. "Since the story has now spread to non-Danish blogs, I have decided to do an English translation so that Americans and others can read it," Tønnesen said.

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Restoring Trust in Photojournalism: Black Star Rising Talks with Dr. Hany Farid

By Scott BaradellscottbaradellcloseAuthor: Scott Baradell See Author's Posts (125)
Recent Posts

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Scott Baradell edits and contributes to Black Star Rising. A former newspaper journalist and executive for Belo Corp., Scott is an accomplished brand strategist who leads the Idea Grove agency. He has nearly two decades of experience working closely with professional photographers, both as a journalist and as a corporate photography buyer. in Photojournalism on August 6th, 2007

Photographers have been manipulating images ever since Abraham Lincoln’s head was attached to John C. Calhoun’s body in one of Lincoln’s most famous portraits. But today, digital technology has made tampering easier and more pervasive than ever. Some believe the trend threatens the public’s fundamental faith in the practice of photojournalism.

In this context, Dr. Hany Farid should be a hero to photojournalists and lovers of photojournalism. Farid, who runs the Image Science Group at Dartmouth College, has emerged as a leading authority on digital forensics. His team has developed some of the most advanced software currently available to detect photo manipulation.

While media organizations — increasingly rocked by photo-doctoring scandals — have not yet invested in Farid’s technology, it seems only a matter of time before this occurs. Here’s our Q&A with Farid:

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Photo-Op
Believing Is Seeing

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By ERROL MORRIS
Published: July 13, 2008

NEWSPAPERS and blogs are once again filled with a story about a digitally altered photograph. A picture of missiles launched by Iran. A picture that purports to show four missiles being fired rather than the three shown in other photographs of the launching. Are we to infer that no missiles were launched? Or just three? Or maybe only two? Take several steps back. Are we being tricked into thinking that Iran is a bigger threat than it is?

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Vietnam War - "The Impact of Media" explores in detail the 'media distortions' due to television's misrepresentations during the Vietnam War. It rebuts the view promoted by PBS 's 13-part documentary series, "Vietnam: A Television History". The rebuttal also applies to "The Ten Thousand Day War" series.

"The Impact of Media" is a must-see for historians and politicians alike. The late president Ronald Reagan lauded this rebuttal video when he watched it and said that it's "something all Americans should see".

Made in 1984.

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Given the emergence of the digital, few appear to be exploring whether more effective and expansive media strategies can now emerge. This site is a forum on possibility, launched in conjunction with the publication of Fred Ritchin's book After Photography in fall of 2008.

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As almost everyone knows by now, various major daily newspaper published, on July 10, a photograph of four Iranian missiles streaking heavenward; then Little Green Footballs (significantly, a blog and not a daily newspaper) provided evidence that the photograph had been faked. Later, many of those same papers published a Whitman’s sampler of retractions and apologies. For me it raised a series of questions about images.[1] Do they provide illustration of a text or an idea of evidence of some underlying reality or both? And if they are evidence, don’t we have to know that the evidence is reliable, that it can be trusted?

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Photo Tampering Throughout History\n\nPhotography lost its innocence many years ago. In as early as the 1860s, photographs were already being manipulated, only a few decades after Niepce created the first photograph in 1814. With the advent of high-resolution digital cameras, powerful personal computers and sophisticated photo-editing software, the manipulation of digital images is becoming more common. Here, I have collected some examples of tampering throughout history.\n\nTo help contend with the implications of this tampering, we have developed a series of tools for detecting traces of tampering in digital images (contact me at Ma'at Consulting for more information about our services).

www.cs.dartmouth.edu/...digitaltampering - Preview

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