Reality Check
The embattled British oil company BP got itself into more trouble a couple of weeks back when it published a photograph on its Website which was subsequently revealed to have been altered. The image related to the company’s control room in Houston which is overseeing the e orts to deal with the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and the manipulation involved pasting images onto two monitor screens which were actually blank at the time the original shot was taken. The inference was that the changes made BP look busier than might have been the case.
On the surface, it looks like a fairly minor bit of retouching which didn’t alter the wider reality (no false content was added), but there’s obviously some specific context to this because the company has been accused by everybody from the US government downwards of not doing enough to deal with its leaking well.
Elsewhere in the USA, the photo editor of the Dallas Morning News discovered that a picture supplied by Getty Images which showed the winner of a golf tournament had been altered by removing the caddy who had been standing behind the player. The caddy’s position – right behind the winner’s shoulder – definitely created a visual distraction and the altered image looked a whole lot better, but it wasn’t what was originally shot. Getty Images promptly killed the picture, and the photographer involved – who also made the alteration – said the edited image got into circulation by mistake and was actually done to show the player himself how easy it would be to edit out the distracting caddy. Another recent incident involving an altered sports picture saw a photographer disqualified from the 2010 World Press Photo awards. His misdemeanour was to edit out the foot of another competitor that appeared in the background of the image. In fact, the shot in question had been very significantly cropped, converted to B&W and had various effects such as vignetting and grain added. Editing out the foot was the very least of the changes and, in fact, made sense once the original had been cropped within an inch of its life, removing the rest of its owner.
Each of these incidents created a storm of forum activity with responses ranging from (and I’m paraphrasing here obviously) ‘Get a life’ to ‘Execution is too good for these cheats’. In other words, on one hand some changes could be acceptable in some circumstances, and, on the other, nothing should ever, ever be touched no matter what. It has been a long-accepted tenet of press photography and photojournalism that images not be altered in terms of adding or removing elements, but the ‘editorialising’ possible in-camera or in the darkroom was acceptable. Of course, these darkroom ‘adjustments’ are now made in Photoshop, but would still count as corrections rather than creations… although even here the boundaries can become blurred. The big problem is that so-called creative Photoshopping is now so out of hand elsewhere in photography that there’s a danger of us becoming immune to the implications of applying a little visual ‘nip and tuck’. Often the excuse is that it makes for a better image in a way that wasn’t possible in-camera. Certainly, if the golf photographer had moved just a step to the right, the offending caddy would have been mostly obscured behind the player. Thing is, though, he would still have been there, whereas Photoshop did a ‘1984’ on him and erased him completely. In terms of telling the story, did it matter that he was upsetting some arbitrary ideal of good composition? No, caddies are, after all, an integral part of professional golf. In a similar vein, I, for one, can’t understand the current obsession with perfect landscapes where anything and everything that offends the eye has been ruthlessly exorcised… and not just any evidence of man’s occupation, but the bits that nature apparently got wrong as well. It’s not reality so why are we trying to pretend that it is? Is it being done just because it can be or had Photoshop stirred something deep in the psyche that needs to change and perfect?
Whatever, it’s just way too complicated to have any grey areas in terms of permissible exceptions so it has to be black and white – images that are intended to depict reality have to depict reality regardless of whether artistic sensibilities might be offended. There can be no other way and, frankly, the sooner we start thinking this way for landscape photography as well, the better.
Paul Burrows, Editor
ProPhoto September 2010
|