I had just concluded my last remarks for this presentation, when all of a sudden here was yet another huge controversy about the manipulation of photographs, this time by a lebanese photographer Adnan Hajj.
In an article in the New York Times, on August 9, 2006
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“Mr. Hajj, a Lebanese photographer based in the Middle East, may not be familiar to many newspaper readers. But thanks to the swift justice of the Internet, he has been charged, tried and convicted of improperly altering photographs he took for Reuters. The pictures ran on the Reuters news service on Saturday, and were discovered almost instantly by bloggers to have been manipulated. Reuters then announced on Sunday that it had fired the freelancer. Executives said yesterday that they were still investigating why they had not discovered the manipulation before the pictures were disseminated to newspapers.
“The matter has created an uproar on the Internet, where many bloggers see an anti-Israel bias in Mr. Hajj’s manipulations, which made the damage from Israeli strikes into Beirut appear worse than the original pictures had. One intensified and replicated plumes of smoke from smoldering debris. In another, he changed an image of an Israeli plane to make it look as if it had dropped three flares instead of one.
“Still, his activities have heightened the anxiety photo editors are already experiencing in the age of digital photography, when pictures can be so easily manipulated by computer.
“These advances, made broadly available to the public and professional photographers alike through Photoshop or similar software, may have made readers more skeptical of what they see in newspapers.“They doubt the media because they understand what digital photography is,” said Torry Bruno, the associate managing editor for photography at The Chicago Tribune. “Everyone who plays with that knows what can be done.”
“But even as technology makes it easier to manipulate photographs, the blogosphere is making it easier to catch the manipulators.
Mr. Hajj’s picture ran on the news service on Saturday. The first inkling of a problem came in the form of a tip that morning to Charles Johnson, who runs a Web site called Little Green Footballs. Mr. Johnson had been among the first in 2004 to question the authenticity of documents that CBS News used to suggest that President Bush had received favorable treatment in the National Guard.
“It is not clear where the tipster first saw the photos, but they were available on the Internet. Mr. Johnson, who has a background in graphic design, said that as soon as he saw the pictures, he could tell they were fake. He posted the news on his Web site on Saturday at 3:41 p.m. California time (he is based in Los Angeles), which was early Sunday morning in Beirut.
‘The post was spotted by a Reuters photographer in Canada, who quickly notified the editors on duty, and they began an investigation.‘Paul Holmes, a senior Reuters editor who is also responsible for the agency’s standards and ethics, said the agency dealt with the matter within 18 hours.
“By the time I checked my e-mail at 10 Sunday morning, we had killed the doctored photo and suspended the photographer,” he said. The agency subsequently stopped using the photographer and has removed the 920 digital photographs of his in its archives. It is reviewing them to see if any others have been improperly altered.
‘Mr. Hajj told Reuters he was merely trying to remove a speck of dust and fix the lighting in the photos, Mr. Holmes said. Several bloggers have contended that Mr. Hajj was driven by a political agenda, critical of Israel. Mr. Holmes said Reuters was trying to contact Mr. Hajj but he was not responding to messages.
‘Jonathan Klein, the chief executive of Getty Images, said the only way to avoid such problems was to “employ people of integrity, and if you find infractions, not only take action, but take visible action.’’
I of course agree with Jonathan Klein, about the idea of only hiring people of integrity. You have to consider that there are people who can be crooks and be fraudulent in any other walk of life, so why be so surprised that it is happening in the world of photojournalism?e degree of comfort is that the technology available is itself the antidote to resolving such problems, just think at the speed at which these fraudulent images were uncovered and made known world wide.
Next however, we also need to uncover all the double standards and hypocrisy behind the way images are made other than with the computer. Photographers, enticing their subjects to hold up dead babies for the camera, in a flagrant act of creating propaganda in one way or another. Or when the editors pick out pictures to match the texts of what they want to convey as their main message. News organizations have used such means always. If you want a President or leader to look in distress, well, you look around for precisely the image that conveys that, no matter that the image had nothing to do with the story being reported other than it is on the same person. That sort of trickery is never reported as being as false as that of the picture from Lebanon that was so discredited for faking the scene.
As I see it, all forms of manipulation, be that altering the content of the image, altering the caption in relation to what is really happening, or just placing images with texts that match in style but are not a representation of what the event being reported was all about, lead to the same thing. Some one is using the power of the photographic image in a inadequate way. But in parallel to all the other changes that are taking place, the fact that there is manipulation is now coming under scrutiny as never before. That can only be applauded.
Pedro Meyer
Mexico City. August 9th, 2006