Reading 2

Unit 9- Reading 2

Page 137

Playing with the pixels

A freelance photographer working in Beirut, Lebanon, tried a little too hard to convey the horror of war. He altered at least two photographs he took there during the summer of 2006. In one, he used computer software to darken and thicken smoke rising from bombed buildings. In another he inserted objects below and behind an F-16 fighter jet to make it look like the jet was firing multiple missiles.

In reality, the jet was firing no missiles at all, only a flare. He then submitted both pictures to a news service, which purchased them and sent them out for newspapers to use. Unfortunately for the photographer, his alterations were soon apparent to some sharp-eyed readers.

Many Internet bloggers pointed out clues-buildings that appeared twice in the same picture, inconsistent shadows, identical vapor trails behind the “missiles.” Within hours, the news service stopped distributing the pictures and dismissed the photographer. Subsequently, they issued a statement that such fakery was unethical and had no place in the news business. Maybe so, but it happens regularly.

Recently, another U.S. news service got caught sending out an altered photo of an Alaskan pipeline worker. An Egyptian newspaper in 2010 altered a photo of Hosni Mubarak, then Egypt’s president, during a visit to the United Nations in New York. The fake photo showed Mubarak walking in front of other world leaders as if he were the most important. In the real, unaltered photo Mubarak is at the back of the group.

In 2003, a California newspaper fired a photographer for combining two pictures from Iraq, taken moments apart, into one. In 2004, the re-election campaign for U.S. President George W. Bush reluctantly admitted altering a video by inserting faces into a crowd of soldiers listening to Bush.

You could tell because some faces appeared at several places in the crowd at the same time. Some of these episodes were relatively trivial? But others were quite serious attempts to mislead the public. All of them undermine the public’s trust in the reality of news photographs. A camera with a long lens can show details no human eye can see.

Actually, that’s good. The public tends to assign too much “reality” to what they see in photographs anyway. We should approach all news photos as somewhat unreal.

What does it mean for a photograph to be true? That it captures what we would perceive if we were standing where the camera was? That’s nonsense. A camera sees quite differently from a human eye.

“Normal” human vision is roughly equivalent to what you get from a 35 millimeter camera lens zoomed out a little bit-to between 42 mm and 50 mm. A lens longer than that shows details no human eye could see. A lens shorter than that shows an unnaturally broad view and too little detail.

There are restrictions to the way any camera can capture an image. Details that you or I could easily see in person may be lost in glare or sunk in a dark spot. Is it okay, then, to use photo editing software to emphasize such details and amend the ‘inaccurate” picture? Doing this would, in some ways, make the photo more accurate.

What about emphasizing lost details that would not be visible to an eyewitness? That would make the photo more accurate in other ways. Should news organizations grant their photographers permission to do that? If not, then should we ban photos taken through microscopes? You can see how quickly the situation gets confused.

Of course, photographers “alter” every photograph they take, simply because they have to make choices about how to take it. They have to decide where to stand, how to stand, whether to put a filter on the lens, and so on. Editors alter them as well, literally and figuratively.

Long before digital photography came along, newspaper editors chopped the edges off photographs, enlarged them, and eliminated scratches or spots with correction fluid. Photo editing software is simply a far smarter successor to those tools. Editors also write headlines and captions, words that can dramatically affect the viewer’s perception of so the image.

A picture of a fallen tree is just a fallen tree—until words tell you whether it’s a good thing (Land Cleared for New Hospital) or a bad thing (Storm Downs 200-Year-Old Oak Tree). What you see when you contemplate a news photo is what you’re told to see.

Sometimes perception is controlled by what you’re allowed to see. When U.S. President Ronald Reagan visited Germany’s Bitburg cemetery in 1985, his aides levied strict limitations on photographers. They could shoot only from certain vantage points. From these sites, they could not get both the president and the graves of Nazi soldiers in the same shot.

The pictures that came out of that event certainly weren’t fake, but were they really true? Another U.S. president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, (in office 1933-1945), had a disease called polio, and used a wheelchair every day throughout his presidency. Yet no major American newspaper or magazine published a picture of him in a wheelchair through that entire 12-year period. The editors of these publications were not ignorant of the president’s disability.

The White House did not keep photographers away. The editors simply didn’t want the public to get the impression that their president was too weak to govern. Looked at as a whole, was the photographic record of FDR’s presidency true? Needless to say, news photographers shouldn’t doctor photographs any more than reporters should make up quotes. But “doctoring” is a slippery concept, and photographic truth is an illusion.