Photojournalism and Manipulation

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rjhorsfall

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Rick Horsfall
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I am a student at the University of Lincoln, studying media production. I am going into my third year and am starting to work towards my dissertation. I have a huge passion for photography and this has led me on to look at manipulation within photography and its effects within a specific area of the photography world. I want to get some opinions from a professional. My current question is below.

Photographic manipulation in photojournalism, how does this affect the consumer and the industry in relation to reality, truth, morality and trust?

I would like some opinions on the subject of manipulation in photojournalism. Is it right or wrong and if there is room for both, where should the lines be drawn?

Has digital technology taken manipulation to an extreme in terms of the photographer’s ability and the consumer’s trust in their work?

If you have anything else or ideas that may help me with my research such as, websites, journals, writers names and any case studies then I would be very grateful. Hope you can make time for me.

Thank you for your time!

Rick Horsfall

rickhorsfall24@hotmail.com
 
dont treat us as thickos mate.. you dont need to keep posting the same message... we will find it :)
 
Hi Rick,
I can recommend a trip to Waterstones/Borders bookshops to check out the Photojournalism books. Whilst browsing them last week, I came across two examples of early manipualtion in photojournalism. It was not unknown for photographers to go the lengths of rearranging corpses to create a "story". One was Alexander Gardner's image dating from 1863 of a sniper killed at his post is one example. Gardner dragged the body 40 yards to a ditch or something and placed a rifle nearby. He used the image in his book and passed it off as photojournalism. It can also be seen here:
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/photo_database/category/photojournalism/

As to whether it's wrong...I don't know. I suppose it depends on the intent. In the example above, the image is deceptive if its intention was to provide an accurate photojournalistic account of the Civil War.

Has digital technology taken image manipulation to an extreme? The desire to manipulate has clearly always been there. Digital has provided us with more far more options and made it easier.

Photographic manipulation in photojournalism, how does this affect the consumer and the industry in relation to reality, truth, morality and trust?
Click to expand...
To me, the term 'photojournalism' implies objectivity. Manipulating an image can alter its reality, truth and morality. Is it always wrong? Probably not. Depends on the extent and nature of the changes.
 
TimSandhu said:
Depends on the extent and nature of the changes.
Click to expand...

That's it, in a nutshell.

Photojournalism, to me, is the reporting of news by means of photography.

If a photo is edited in such a way, that the viewer is given a false impression of reality, then this is wrong. Quite how a false impression of reality is defined, is of course subjective. That's the grey area.

You could argue, that using a wide-angle lens makes a situation appear more dramatic than it actually is. Or that using a slower shutter speed makes something appear more hectic than it is. You could say that all photos should be taken at 35mm and from eye-level to give the perspective of a regular eyewitness, but wouldn't that destroy the art of photography?

If so, then you have to allow that creative licence to exist in the field. And if that's the case, why not in Photoshop afterwards?

And yet, a paparazzi photographer who uses digital image manipulation to increase the size of Miss Celebrity's breasts (with, or without the intent of making a news story out of it) is clearly in the wrong (not to mention really childish, but that's off-topic :lol:).

Also bear in mind, that pp can sometimes have the opposite effect, and actually make a photo more faithful to the original subject. (e.g. white balance if this was off in one shot).

So, ultimately, it's up to the photojournalist how to process his images (this one's a he... could also be a she...). The people who view his pictures put a certain amount of trust in him, that he's produced them in as realistic a way as possible. The more people view his photos, the greater his responsibility to portray scenes exactly how he experienced them.

Hope that helps - nothing official at all, just the contents of my brain in no particular order.
 
and then there's this famous example....

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Not sure if this is the kind of reply you're looking for but I remember years ago (15 or even 20 maybe) when a British trucker was arrested in Turkey (I think) because the parts that he had on the back of his wagon were not for sewer pipes as he thought but for an Iraqi supergun.

After being put in jail both he and his family were given support and assistance by the Daily Mirror in return for his story when he was released and on that day he was pictured leaving jail wearing a white t-shirt embalzoned with the Mirror's logo.

The same day the same photo appeared in the Sun, but miraculously the logo on the t-shirt had changed to their own logo!
 
Kenneth Kobre's excellent book on photojournalism has a whole chapter dedicated to ethics and illustrates various cases where journalists have fallen foul of being caught out manipulating the images.

Whilst post production obviously springs to mind there was a guy who was fired for taking a photo of a firefighter fighting a brush fire. And the disgraced journalists crime? He asked the firefighter to bend over a swimming pool behind a house and damp his brow with some some water!

The ethics of photojournalism demands clean, unmanipulated shots. I guess you could argue that the mere presence of a journalist alters the behaviour of people in the vicinity but any purposeful attempts at manipulation are a big no-no.
 
I'm not sure that digital technology has added anything to our ability to manipulate reality. You only have to look at the examples of sculpture and paintings that capture a historic moment and turn it into a more media friendly alternative of reality to see that we have been doing this for centuries. How can any painting or sculpture, presumably taking many hours to create, accurately represent a moment in time? To presume that we have only had the ability or forsight to do this recently is niaive.
 
contrast / colour etc is fine in my opinion. Adding or removing items from a shot is out of order I reckon. Surely as a photojournalist the aim is to show as truthfully fully as possible through a photography. Do you remember the guy that added extra smoke to a photo from a war zone using the clone tool? Fired! Or how about the Iranians photoshopping in a few extra working missiles. Fail.

That's just my opinion though.
 
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