If you’re going to enter Canon’s The Assignment photography competition, it’s probably not a good idea to submit one of Windows Vista’s official wallpapers as your own work (original image by Darrell Gulin here). Especially if the image is licenced by Getty Images, who have something of a reputation for heavy-handedness when it comes to pursuing copyright infringement (Canon actually sponsors the Getty Image Gallery in London too). [Via the Talk Photography forums]
I’m looking forward to going to see the Walker Evans exhibition at the Photographers Gallery (15th May–12th July) at some point this week. Although Evans is best known for his work documenting America’s rural south during the 1930s (for the Farm Security Administration, and his book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), this exhibition also features colour Polaroids taken in the 70s, near the end of his life. Should be really interesting. The exhibition of Evans’ work is accompanied by an exhibition by a photographer I’m not familiar with, Frank Breuer, whose series Warehouses and Logos “depicts the presence of global corporations in the European landscape”. Sounds like my cup of tea too.
Evans’ work has long been an influential favourite of mine, and led me to discover the work of artist Lewis Baltz. Baltz emerged in the late 70s as part of the New Topographic movement, and his photographs offer stark, graphic depictions of man’s influence on the landscape — in some respects the polar opposite of someone like Ansel Adams, but in some ways very similar — quite a few of Baltz’s photos are online at the George Eastman House web site. A biography of Baltz at Princeton University Art Museum states that he “recognized a shift in landscape photography away from a heroic vision of the American wilderness toward the often banal character of a growing suburbia”.
Baltz’s photographs in “New Topographics” consisted entirely of images of an industrial warehouse complex in Southern California, several of which are on view in this exhibition. Tightly composed photographs of blank concrete walls and prefabricated buildings, the images convey a sense of the claustrophobia and anonymity of urban life.
In Nevada, Baltz’s next major effort, a new narrative style emerged. Tracing the incursion of housing developments into the desert valleys surrounding Reno, Nevada, Baltz alternated panoramic views of the horizon with photographs of construction sites, trailer parks, and city streets to show an open landscape slowly being devoured. Nevada was the first step toward a pictorial methodology of intensely detailed mapping that Baltz was to explore over the next decade, culminating in his epic project, Candlestick Point. Photographed between 1984 and 1988, the series explored in grim detail a landscape scraped bare of almost all natural references, pinned between the airport and the ballpark just south of San Francisco.
On Monday, March 31, the Los Angeles Times published a front-page photograph of US soldiers holding a large group of Iraqis prisoner. The paper later discovered that the photograph had been altered by the photographer — he had composited two similar photographs to improve the composition — before sending them to the paper. Although the manipulation hadn’t radically altered the meaning of the pictures, the LA Times felt this violated their editorial policy, and sacked the photographer, Brian Walski. The paper’s editor published an explanation, showing the 2 original photos and the composite. Good for him – in an age when the media are constantly competing to come up with the most powerful images with which to woo the public, it’s reassuring to see such a principled stance. Sure, it’s unfortunate for Mr Walski, whose intentions were probably perfectly innocent, but with Photoshop’s power to distort images (literally and figuratively) I think it’s vital for the public to be able to trust news photos. As the National Union of Journalists puts it, ‘If the credibility of news photography is to be maintained, then manipulated “non-photos” must be marked as such.’
I don’t expect such principles from London’s Evening Standard though. On Wednesday April 9th the paper’s front page displayed a large photo of celebrating Iraqis, with the headline ‘Jubilation on the streets of Baghdad FREEDOM’. Well, sharp-eyed Simone Moore spotted that this photograph had been doctored — you can see the altered Evening Standard image at IndyMedia.
The photo is a still taken from BBC News 24. This massive image has been very obviously doctored in a programme such as Photoshop. The image features a massive crowd of Iraqi’s celebrating in the streets, HOWEVER in the mid and background it is possible to see how numerous photo’s have been cut and pasted together to create the illusion of there being a massive crowd present.
When you examine the photograph carefully, it’s clearly a composite of several shots. Now the Standard’s picture desk is apparently claiming it was only altered to remove the BBC logo, but to me this seems like the thin end of the wedge. Admittedly, there’s a fine line between between enhancing (a bit of dodging & burning, tweaking the curves, or unsharp masking) and manipulating (combining multiple photos, cloning parts of an image), but given the political significance of this particular scene, I think the Standard has crossed the line.
Hypothetically, if you have a photo of ten people, but you alter it to make it appear that 500 people are present, that would clearly be a distortion of the truth. The same goes for ten people made to look like 12. The numbers and motive are irrelevant; you’re deliberately making significant alterations to the image, and it becomes an illustration rather than an accurate record. (For more on the ethical/practical dilemmas, see If you Mac it, mark it!
In this instance, we have a newspaper manipulating photos to produce a composite picture that could be seen as vindicating its pro-war editorial line. But if it was the Independent altering a photo to support its anti-war stance, I’d still feel the same – it’s clearly wrong. And the Press Complaints Commission Code of Practice would seem to support me on this:
Accuracy
i) Newspapers and periodicals must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted material including pictures.
As would the National Union of Journalists’ Code of Conduct:
No journalist shall knowingly cause or allow the publication or broadcast of a photograph that has been manipulated unless that photograph is clearly labelled as such. Manipulation does not include normal dodging, burning, colour balancing, spotting, contrast adjustment, cropping and obvious masking for legal or safety reasons.
Maybe I should stop ranting here and actually complain to the PCC…
New York radio station WNYC has created The Art of War, an online gallery of their listners/visitors artistic takes on the current war on Iraq. Both pro- and anti-war viewspoints are represented in photographs, paintings, editorial cartoons and digital animation.
The Digital Journalist, a showcase for photojournalism, is exhibiting some powerful photographs of the Iraq war (links to galleries near bottom of page) selected by editors from Agence France Press, Associated Press, Corbis, Getty Images, Newsweek, The New York Times, and Reuters.
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