News photos should represent clear, objective reality. But pictures are 2-D representations of a 3-D world, and they can sometimes trick fallible human eyes.
On Nov. 6, several readers thought they spied something shocking in the “Star Magazine.” A photo by Tim Janicke depicted a man walking in Leavenworth National Cemetery. Over 30 readers contacted The Star, certain that the subject was exposing himself lewdly in the shot.
At first glance, I suppose I can understand the confusion. But Janicke showed me other pictures taken just seconds before and after, and they show clearly that readers were simply misinterpreting a keychain attached to the man’s belt.
“Well, why didn’t you just blur that part out?” asked one caller when I explained the photo to her. “I know you can change things like that, and that’s what you should have done.”
It’s always been possible to alter pictures, using low-tech tools like razor blades and airbrushes to disguise or obliterate objects captured by the lens.
Though it pains most modern journalists to admit it, newspapers used to employ these techniques constantly in decades past. In The Star’s old photo files, it’s not uncommon to find images from the early 1970s and before with “extraneous” people or objects literally painted out of the frame. Today, American journalists consider it unethical to amend reality that way.
Photo manipulation is even easier now that every image in the paper is processed in a computer. Even though software like Adobe Photoshop could allow photographers to make drastic and undetectable alterations to an image, there is a very narrow range of tweaks that are acceptable for news photography.
Adjusting the color balance or brightness of an image is perfectly ethical, and often crucial to make the picture as close to reality as possible in the printed product. These changes must enhance visibility and mustn’t result in a distortion of what was actually photographed.
I think it’s also fine to remove minor imperfections that result from flaws in the technical process of taking the picture. If a speck of dust inside the camera gives the erroneous appearance of a brown dot on a pristine snowdrift, I’d argue that digitally removing it would actually enhance the truthfulness of the image.
When an Air France Concorde crashed outside Paris in July 2000, the best shot available contained a large amount of “noise” or graininess, making the picture difficult to understand. Star photo editors used Photoshop to smooth out the noise, and I think again it helped readers see what actually occurred.
In last week’s “Star Magazine,” it would have been easy for Janicke simply to “erase” the keychain digitally to avoid confusion. But that would have been unethical. Removing it would have radically altered the reality of what the camera captured.
More to the point, this was a case where editors simply didn’t notice that the picture might give a false impression. Picking a different, similar picture would have been an easier fix than Photoshopping the image.
