Visual manipualtions violates trust of readers/viewers in reporting the news

I'm late to join the class discussion but I've been avidly following the ongoing discussions. Over the years that I have worked as a photojournalist every so often there arises an outrage when it is discovered that an award winning photograph has been manipulating some of his photographs. These days it is so easy to manipulate photographs digitally but in the past photographers also manipulated photographs by managing the situation to "create" the photograph, the image, that they wanted to portray.

In fact in can be persuasively argued that Dorothea Lange's famous photo "Migrant Mother" is a manipulated image and it has been proven that the image was manipulated in the darkroom. If you look at the series of images, the negatives from which Lange's famous image came from, Lange took a variety of images eliminating some of the children until she arrived at the iconic image and the image was retouched. I've included a link that shows the retouched image.

http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/128_migm.html


Almost three years ago, Allan Detrich, a veteran, award-winning photojournalist with the Toledo Blade, had to resign after it was discovered that a photograph that was published in the Blade, had been digitally manipulated. Detrich's manipulation was to "clean" up the photograph's composition by eliminating the legs of some people in the background of the photograph. The manipulation would not have been discovered except for the fact that other photojournalists photographs of the same event were not digitally altered. The National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) reported on the controversy. Here is the link to their report.

http://www.nppa.org/news_and_events/news/2007/04/toledo03.html

The NPPA has taken a very pro-active stance against the manipulation of news photographs and has a Code of Ethics. I've included the link to the Code.

http://www.nppa.org/professional_development/business_practices/ethics.html

It's an unfortunate fact of life that in the pursuit of the perfect image or the perfect story, journalists and photojournalist sometimes find it convenient to manipulate, alter and at times simply create fiction. Past examples include Janet Cooke's story on a child heroin addict in the Washington Post, Stephen Glass's reporting for the New Republic and Jayson Blair's reporting for the New York Times.

When these transgressions were revealed, as hard as these publications tried to redeem their journalistic integrity, the public response seems to be of an attitude that their deepest suspicions of journalism are only confirmed, despite the self-flagellating efforts by the New York Times to review all of Blair's reporting and printing a public report in the paper revealing even more transgressions.

As a photojournalist I find it difficult to accept the class assignment to take one of my photographs and digitally manipulate it but I'll accept the task. There have been times in the past at the newspaper when we will digitally alter a photograph to accompany a story and on those occassions we always label the photograph as a "Photo Illustration".

I've taken a photo of a nun in Maaloula sweeping the trash early in the morning and by using the cloning tool in photoshop I've added additional trash for her to sweep. Similar to what Mr. Detrich did in his photo but he eliminated the legs of the people standing in the background.

Ethical reporting by journalists and photojournalists protects not only their individual integrity but the integrity of the community of journalists and photojournalists.