Maybe as a consumer you don’t care, but as a journalist it is deeply troubling. It undermines our credibility; it’s already hard enough, sometimes, to convince people a photo isn’t doctored due to computer image editing programs. And where does one draw the line? If it’s okay to remove a fencepost, is it okay to remove a piece of trash? An distracting person who isn’t adding anything to the image? Is it okay to composite two photos, as the one photographer did in the link I gave before, to create a third, more powerful image, that really isn’t that far away from the truth? That guy got fire, and rightfully so. You don’t composite images and call it a news photo. You don’t move elements of your environment around. You cannot, say, go to an earthquake site with rubble and move a child’s stuffed animal from, say, this location to this other location because it looks better. You’re not there to create photos. You’re there to take them.
As journalists, we must have the public’s trust to do our job effectively. Altering photos in any way erodes this trust. As a photojournalist, if you have a distracting background, your job is to find a way around it. Move, change your angle, whatever, but do not Photoshop it out. If a great moment happens, as in the Kent State photo, and you have a distracting element in the background, tough shit. You leave it in. Your job is to record reality as faithfully as possible. Obviously, you can get into philosophical arguments about how lens selection, angle selection, etc., can subtly alter perceptions and interpretations of “reality,” but directly changing the content of your photo in post-production is, and has always been, a big no-no.
I just watched a clip from Faux News (via Perez) where they had some Republican chick having a fit about the cover and blah blah and unflattering to women and blah blah and you must retouch blah blah — OK. Got it.
So I go to Newsweek’s website, to get a better look at this picture (the beotches on Faux kept saying "You can’t see on TV how awful this photograph is) and I read the headline for the article which is:
So — that part isn’t unflattering?
You can call a beotch stooopid, but hey, making her ugly, that just ain’t cool.
How bizarre.
If you get your hands on the dead tree version of Newsweek, check this out: Right inside the cover (on the back of Palin’s face) is a half-face chiaroscuro picture of Christian Slater, and on the opposte page in big type is the name of his new show, “My Own Worst Enemy”. The similarity is at least amusing (or another affront to decent folks).
I couldn’t see the difference in the Kent State picture either (compressed to that size, the retouching looks bad enough that you can still notice something there). After some poking around I found the answer, but also learned that Vecchio was 14 in the shot. She looks … old for her age.
It’s ok. Age sort of flattens out as you get older. I’d do George Clooney (who is probabaly my age) or Sean Connery (who is a little older than my dad, I think. But 20 years ago I would have thought him too old).
I should not have snapped at you and I’m sorry I did. The repititions of “for her age” just got to me. I’ll try to be better in the future.
It’s not her age (and I’m 40 sometime over next week, I just got lucky and married someone 15 years younger), it’s that her morality is somewhere on par with the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
I can’t figure why it was important or desirable to somebody to have the fencepost removed, but I will point out that the retouched version was re-published twenty-five years after the original won the Pulitzer.
Not that that makes any difference, from an ethics standpoint.
And it should be, to a journalist, particularly to a photojournalist of any skill, given our current level of technology.
As a consumer, I would be outraged by adding elements, moving elements, or composites, and, of course, any substantive change.
I just found brushing out the fence-post and antenna completely insignificant compared to the other changes in the link. Those I found egregious.
I don’t think distractions should be allowed to dilute the main point, in writing or photography. I guess the photos shouldn’t have been used, but both capture pain so well …
Makes the very idea of minimizing wrinkles or pores seem at bit trivial. I would think Palin supported would praised every wrinkle shown as indicative of experience.
No offense taken. And I think your point about age is very true: I think most people would find it rather odd if a 20something was serious in some romantic way about a 40something, but a 40something with a 60 something? Eh, sure.
Though, you know, with a username like yours, the age jokes are just too easy…