Dennis Dunleavy

God Bless The Altered States of Reality

What do news diva Katie Couric (above) and a model posing for a picture (below) from one of the latest in a long line of point-and-shoot digital cameras have in common?


The reality is that both images have been altered significantly. We are looking at different forms of manipulation. Both pictures have been digitally altered. The surprise here is that the alterations of the picture showing the model was actually done inside the camera.

Couric's image was manipulated in post-production process to make her look thinner. Couric is in good company. Other celebs such as Oprah Winfry, Martha Stewart, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Kate Winslet have also gotten the Photoshop slim fast treatment during the past few years.

This is the way our culture operates -- women are suppose to appear as waifish as paper plates otherwise men will not find them attractive. Men, on the other hand, are support to look manly -- tough yet intelligent.

When was the last time someone the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly had a little Photoshop tummy tuck?

Now, with Hewlett Packard's slimming feature everyone can be just like Katie, after Photoshop of course.

In HP's latest sales pitch for its digital cameras there is a series of step by step slides that takes the viewer through the simplicity of the "slimming" feature. Losing weight has never been easier or as surreal.

So, what do Couric and the HP ad hand have in common?

To begin with these two examples illustrate the pervasive nature of image manipulation has become in our culture. Why should anyone care if a news image is altered if they have already have the capacity to mess with just about any picture, inside and outside of the camera?

With the ability to alter reality in an instance with the touch of a button -- the digital camera requires no skill in altering a person's appearance -- I am reminded of the French theorist Jean Baudrilliard's classic work on the notion of simulacra. The term simulacra refers to an unsatisfactory imitation of reality – something where only a copy of something exists. There is no original.

Society has arrived at the age of the simulacrum --  a time where the image, according to Baudrillard:

        Is the reflection of a basic reality.

        Masks and perverts a basic reality.

        Masks the absence of a basic reality.

Bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

Once stripped of its original truth, the sign and the reality it is imbued it with have no equivalence. This imbroglio -- this inability to distinguish fact from fiction -- bears down on us with tremendous force.

Photojournalism: In and Out of the Hotseat

photo by Jim Wilson/ New York Times

This image by New York Times veteran photojournalist Jim Wilson has been raising eyebrows this week after some critics thought they had detected another case of image foul play. In the picture the singer's microphone cable appears to be missing. I have provided a series of englargements of the area suspected of being altered.

With all the recent blogospheric blather going on, especially from the conservative camp, looking to attack the media whenever it can, The New York Times, and the photojournalist, took pains to make sure to explain themselves. The original attack took place by a blogger called "ALLAHPUNDIT" who is affliated with Michelle and Jesse Malkin's Hot Air blog.

Within a day of the image appearing on a New York Times Website, Wilson responded to charges that he had doctored the image.

If you look carefully at the frame, you will see a slightly wide band of dark area that runs from the head of a marine with dark hair in the back row up to the singer. Look carefully at the wall from that marine’s head up to the top of the frame and you will see the blurred cable that was in motion because the dancer was moving it as she spoke to the marines. The full cable is in the shot but is blurred. The reason it isn’t sharp is because the frame was shot at 1/6 of a second in a room that was dark. The flash filled in the frame but wasn’t the main light, the room light provided the main light for the frame. The long exposure balanced the light from the strobe on my camera with the ambient light in the room. The cable was moving as was the singer and the marines. If you look carefully at the frame, you’ll see that nothing in the frame is tack/crisp sharp. I looked in the paper that I got out here and know that the reproduction left the wire virtually invisible.

Wilson's explanation is clear and logical. Hopefully, even those people with little knowledge of how the camera works will get it.

Nevertheless, photojournalists must be on their toes because the wolves are at the door now. Like it or not, the blogosphere revels in trying to bring down the house, especially if it is a big house such as The New York Times.

Will photojournalists be less likely to take images that might raise even the most incrediculous questions who seem to know so little about the medium?

I should mention that Catherine Mathis, Director of Corporate Communications for the New York Times, promptly responded to my concerns about the image and pointed me in the directions I needed to go in terms of informing myself better. I think it is important to know that the NY Times takes these sorts of issues seriously and does not under estimate the power of the Web.

Photography as ritual: Part 2

The photograph exists in the world as a real object.

The idea that we can hold on to experiences through the fixing of a moment in time as a photograph is compelling. The act of making images is ritualized by patterns of behaviors.

The social functions of a photograph are diverse and numerous. The social function of the photograph  performs a variety of personal and social needs including the need, to inform, evident, validate, entertain, criticize, report, illuminate, or instruct.

Photography can become a ritualized activity because many of the processes that go into the making of a picture appear automatic and second nature.

At the same time, we shouldn't confuse how the term ritual as primarily been connected to religious ceremony. In this context, we are extending the original ideas about ritual to extend to daily life.

Ever since the Kodak One camera in the late 1800s,  the visual behavior associated with making images have become part of every day life – with one hand we reach for a Kleenex to wipe the tears from our eyes, while with the other hand we reach for a camera to record the moment. There is no denying the emotional associations that move us to document moments in time.

For Catherine Bell (1992),  A ritual may be “described as particularly thoughtless action -- routinized, habitual, obsessive, or mimetic-and therefore the purely formal, secondary, and mere physical expression of logically prior ideas.” In photography, ritual refers primarily to those activities that become embedded in all stages of the picture making process including, pre-visualization, interaction with subjects, composition, technical considerations, image capture, and post-production.

Thinking of photography as an activity guided by embedded ritual -- the interaction between photographer and subject, pose, gesture,  shot, another pose, another shot, edit, presentation – all suggests  patterns of behavior that govern expectations and obligations in the process.

Photographic ritual create conditions of knowing and being.

All of the expectations and obligations associated with the making of a picture illustrate the ritualized nature of photography.

When I make a picture, I expect it to come out, be of reasonably high quality, capture a moment that is meaningful to me, and represent what I am looking at accurately. Therefore, there are certain routines I engage in to make sure that my expectations are met.

In terms of obligation, most of what I feel toward my subject comes through the picture I make. I feel obligated to make a picture that the subject will be happy with (this is in a personal context, not necessarily in a photojournalistic context). I feel obligated to build a rapport with the person I am photographing that honors the individual when possible.

Photography as ritual: Part 1

A Japanese couple, their bride's maid, and photographer, walk through an afternoon rainstorm on the shore of Lake Louise in Canada's Banff National Park yesterday.

Ritualized activities are deeply embedded in human behavior. Although originally used to describe a religious or solemn ceremony, the term ritual today has taken on broader meanings. For the past 150 years, the photograph has played a critical role in creating and maintaining social interactions.

Rituals consist of both technical and social considerations that govern attitudes and behaviors in front of as well as behind the lens of the camera.

Social relationships between photojournalists and subjects constitute a complex symbolic universe of visual rituals. According to Erving Goffman (1967) rituals impinge “upon the individual in two general ways: directly, as obligations, establishing how he is morally constrained to conduct himself; indirectly, as expectations, establishing how others are morally bound to act in regard to him” (p. 49). 

Goffman's ideas are important to consider at a time when photography is undergoing increasing scrutiny and reflection. In photography, extending Goffman’s model of interaction ritual to human visual behavior provides a richer context for evaluating professional conduct and ethical behavior.

Social relationships between photographer and subject are constantly mediated by the expectations and obligations of the individuals involved in the interaction.

Digital photography changes the dynamics of social interaction and human experience in many ways. Among the most obvious dynamics emerging from the use of digital photography is ability to review and share images immediately after capture. Photography may still be a "get-what-you-see" process" but digital photography allows for immediate and repeated corrective processes that were unavailable with film photography.

The rituals in digital photography extend the potential of social interaction beyond what we have been familiar with in film photography. Photographic digital rituals, however, remain situated within cultural practices that symbolically reorganize sensory experience.

The picture still fixes a moment in time, but digital photography appears to extenuate and expand on social rituals both in the capturing of the image as well as in post production processes.

The characteristics of digital photography eliminate sequences in the ritual process of image production. With digital photography the traditional “liminal” period of the latent image—one that transforms the subject into a negative and then back into a positive print—is altered.

Symbolically, the liminal period granted the photojournalist a greater degree of autonomy from the subject. Anthropologist and artist David Tomas (1982) describes this process as the “rite of separation” which is marked by the boundaries of  “electromechanical mediation and optical-chemical consequences” (p. 8).

Historically, the ceremonial ritual of separation in photography consisted of two distinct rites, the capture of an image in a viewfinder followed by processing and development in the darkroom. Therefore, the symbolic transformations of reality occurring between the subject, photojournalist and viewer correspond to face-to-face interaction rituals on one hand, and optical-chemical processes on the other hand.

The ritual interactions of social relationships formed by the use of the digital camera may be very similar to those encountered with users of the SX-70 Polaroid camera. With the elimination of the liminal period in digital photography the ritualized interaction of separation between the photographer and subject also changes.

As previously noted, this dynamic imposes some challenges to the photographer’s epistemic autonomy in capturing and processing images.

Reflecting on the world through the lens

The curator’s eye is cultivated to look at things differently. The curator is an aesthetician, someone deeply concerned with the nature and beauty of things. Show a curator pictures from the daily newspaper and they may scoff.  Photojournalism, they may say, is not art. The response a curator may have to news images is not necessarily informed entirely by the beauty of the subject, but by the motivations and ideologies behind them.

The museum curator might look upon news pictures as craft or kitsch rather than as art because many times there is a sense that creator of the image has been denuded from the process. Journalism, especially photojournalism, alleges a position of neutrality that compromises and often confounds the ways in which we look at the world through images.

The recent manipulation of images in the news, and all the criticism that goes along with it, supports the idea that if pictures are altered, for whatever reason, they lose the pretext of neutrality as reportage by entering the realm of abstraction. Needless to say, the implications of this shift become not only an epistemological issue but an ontological problem as well.  There is a difference here between ways of knowing (epistemology) and ways of being (ontology) is significant to point out here.

I believe we, as consumers of images – artistic or not – are adjusting sociologically to an array of technological innovations which significantly impinge on visual practice. The ways in which electronic digital photo editing and digital photography impinge on how see and act toward the world go far beyond professional practice.

The real shift in the metaphysics of understanding how we see and know things is being challenged every day as average folk pick up the digital happy snap to capture the baby’s first steps or cut into a delicious birthday cake. The more people assimilate to digital culture in terms of manipulating photos in and out of the camera, the greater the tolerance of ambiguity emerges around long-standing acceptable standards and practices.  The stink professionals are making today about conforming to zero-tolerance policies on digital alteration may mean very little to the general public when this sort of practice becomes commonplace.

What we can learn from how the public feels about digital photo manipulation

Several weeks ago I launched an informal survey on this blog concerning public perceptions and attitdues toward photo manipulation. Relying on email invations and posting notices to other like-minded blogs, some early results confirm a few of the assumptions flying around the Internet these days.

Problems with the survey

First and foremost, this suvey is not a representative sample of a specific group and can make no claims at being conclusive.

The hope here is that this instrument may be used as a tool for directing future conversations about the role of the media in constructing social realities through the creation of news products.

The increasing frequency of digital photographic manipulation in the production of news images demands serious examination beyond the flagellation of the media or the unabashed right-wing vitriol found in the blogosphere. Therefore, no claims of accuracy or predictability can be made here. 

Nevertheless, when I review some of the responses collected to date, there is an interesting pattern developing that would indicate the need for further study and analysis.

Without knowing the demographic makeup of the respondents, many of whom are professionals and educators, there is no way of really drawing any conclusions here.

At the same time, there a few interesting issues to consider given the fact that many respondents believe that news pictures can direct foreign policy decisisions, have heard about or seen examples of photo manipulation with the past five years, and think news organizations need to better monitor the integrity of the images they distribute from the conflict in Lebanon.

Overwhelmingly, respondents do think the general public cares if a photographer alters an image and that digital manipulation is an increasing concern for photographers. Furthermore, a majority of respondents think I the mainstream media is capable of self-regulating itself in terms of manipulating images and that the government should be kept away from attempting to regulate the media.

Finally, another interesting point that comes out of this survey is that many people think that photo-ops are a form of photo manipulation. This should help us look at these issues in new ways rather than limiting discussions only to post-production processes.

The early results (n=338) can be seen online. However,  be careful not to  draw any concrete conclusions here. Instead, use the information as a  way of thinking and talking more clearly about how photojournalism should respond to this crisis.

The coversation continues: David Perlmutter on the crisis in photojournalism

Photojournalism educator and researcher David Perlmutter weighed in on the controversy presently challenging mass media these days. In his Editor & Publisher commentary, Perlmutter laments:

"The Israeli-Hezbollah war has left many dead bodies, ruined towns, and wobbling politicians in its wake, but the media historian of the future may also count as one more victim the profession of photojournalism."

 

What do we do now?

I have been thinking a great deal about the previous post. Using the manipulation example that I did was over the top in terms wanting to make a very important point.

Evaluating any practice is always a matter of context.

What I am afraid of is that the average person does not typically distinguish between genres of pictures such as advertising images and magazine covers, or news images and personal snap shots. Maybe I am totally naive here, but I think alot of people read pictures as pictures first, while interpreting the context later.

Our goal, as photojournalists and educators, should be to educate people on the importance of images in society. This is where the conversation needs to start.

Sophie has a cold: How much photoshop is too much photoshop?

Sophie has a cold. You might not know it from this image, but Sophie has a very runny nose. Thanks to the power of photoshop it took less than 60 seconds to remove the unsligthly mess from under the child's nose.

Less than a minute to make Sophie appear normal. I am not going to let this get to my head -- but talk about the power to change reality.

What harm can come from wiping off a little nasal mucus?

As a parent this sort of slight of hand would be perfectly acceptable. I want my child to look good -- I want her to feel and look healthy.

However, as a photojournalist I am conflictive. I wouldn't mind the child looking healthy, but altering reality is misleading.

It's all about context.

If the picture were to be used in a newspaper -- my policy would be hands-off the picture. I think a majority of U.S. photojournalists would agree with me here. At the same time, I also wonder if industry standards are being forced to change by the ubiquity of the tools.

I wonder,though if acceptable levels of digital alteration are coming more relaxed.

It has been nearly five years since Jennifer Greer and Joseph Gosen published their study on assessing levels of photo digital manipulation and media credibility was published in Visual Communication Quarterly. The article traces the history of digital manipulation as well as explores the “effect that different levels of photo manipulation have on public attitudes toward the credibility of a photography, photography in general, and the news media.

Greer and Gosen found that the levels of alteration do affect credibility. The more obvious the manipulation, therefore, the less credible the news picture becomes. The authors caution, however, that rampant digital manipulation along with increased media criticism of photojournalism impacts both the public’s perception of photojournalism as a force for accurate and balance visual reportage as well as overall distrust in the media.

“Results showed that readers/viewers do make distinctions about levels of alteration and, while alteration may be justified in some circumstances, the public might take issue with the alteration if it goes too far.

Just because one digitally altered photograph had no significant impact [in the study] does not mean that this pattern would hold true after media consumers were exposed to many cases of digital alteration.”

Fast-forwarding five years from the date of this study to reflect on what is happening today in the media is revealing and quite troubling.

Eric Boehlert,  writing on the Huffington Post, explains that some conservative factions have used the recent photo manipulation scandal as a war-cry to rally the media-hating troops.

Boehlert notes:

Obsessed with proving that all MSM (mainstream media) reporting from Iraq and the Middle East is biased in favor of Islamic terrorists and therefore American news consumers aren't getting the 'truth' about either region, LGF (Little Green Footballs) has been at the center of an on-going crusade to de-legitimize the press. (Conservative media critics are out to destroy the press; liberal critics want to make it better, stronger.) To the warbloggers, journalists are terrorists. Or as one LGF headline put it, "The Media Are The Enemy."

At first, some critics believed that outing the media on its coverage of the war between Hezbollah and Israel was a positive thing. Now we are learning about the politics behind crusade. 

Ultimately, it comes down to the consumer of images to fully acknowledge how the media works for and against people. As Greer and Gosen remind us:

Photojournalists, as well as the reading/viewing public, already benefit from the power of faster, more efficient methods of visual reportage. However, if left in careless hands, this powerful tool potentially can damage the credibility of photography and media.

Unfortunately, this prescient passage has already come to pass too quickly -- not only because of careless and unethical image handling and irresponsible editing --  but also because ideologues (on the left and on the right) seek to capitalize on an already vulnerable and weak-kneed media to push an agenda. 

survey reminder

I would like folks to participate in a short online survey concerning photo manipulation. Thanks to those individuals who have already taken it.

The survey asks a range of questions from types of manipulation to being able to spot a picture that has been altered. After collecting sufficient results we can post the results online. Thanks!

An undeniable truth: The Internet is keeping journalism honest

In writing about last week's photoshop debacle at Reuters, the Los Angeles Times hits the nail on the head. Ironically, this comes from a newspaper who had to deal with one of its own fabricating reality by combining two pictures to make a so-called better one.

In the article, Tim Rutten makes the point that "one of the undeniable strengths of the Internet and of the blogosphere...." is "...the fact that it is being employed to help keep journalism honest ultimately is to everybody's benefit."

Rutten suggests that instead of waiting for right-wing bloggers to pounch, news operations need to a better job monitoring and policing the images coming out of conflict zones.

This might seem like a no-brainer of an idea, but it also makes good sense considering the impact a photo manipulated image or a staged event can have on a publication.

In addition, Rutten says something that has concerned me for more than 15 years -- outsourcing content to less than reputable sources.

Rutten contends, after running through the gamut of possible explanations for the manipulations, that this:

"brings us to the most troubling of the possible explanations for these fraudulent photos, which is that some of the photojournalists involved are either intimidated by or sympathetic to the Hezbollah terrorists. It's a possibility fraught with harsh implications, but it needs to be examined thoroughly and openly."

Now, let's see if publications get the message.

Open season on photojournalism: Critics have a field day

It's open season on photojournalism these days, and critics are having a field day destroying the integrity of a profession grounded in truth-telling and ethical behavior.

No matter the degree of the infraction, photojournalism, and by association, mass media, is feeling the heat.

Jim Lewis’ scathing critique of photojournalism in Slate.com holds newsgathering organizations to task for the recent spate of problems -- problems ranging from digital manipulation to the staging of news pictures. 

It’s not that these issues have never existed before, but the frequency of the transgressions have placed a profession, photojournalism, under great scrutiny.

The problem with Lewis’ self-indulgent photobash is that he spends a lot of time repeating what others have been saying for some time now. His language is vindictive, which may lead a lot of photojournalists to flat out dismiss his arguments.

Nevertheless, it is worth spending a little time reflecting on some of Lewis’ ideas.

Lewis notes:

It’s beginning to look as if every major institution that prints photos has printed doctored or manipulated photos: Time and Newsweek, the New York Times and USA Today, Harvard University and Science magazine, and the 2004 Bush campaign…. all of them undermine the public's trust in the reality of photographs. And so much the better, because that trust is badly misplaced.

What, after all, do we believe when we believe that a photograph is true?

Susan Sontag, in Regarding the Pain of Others, examines the question: “Who are the ‘WE’” at which pictures are aimed.

This is what comes to mind when Lewis frames the "we" perspective in his analysis.

When it comes to looking at pictures depicting the suffering and pain of others, Sontag reminds us, the “WE” should never be taken for granted (p.7).

There seems to be no denying that the notion of a collective “WE” has changed from the days of our fathers, grandfathers, and forefathers.

For many, the idea of a united “WE” seems inextricably bound to the creation of an US and a THEM. The photographs and words seen and read in newspapers and magazines reaffirm a “WE” that attempts to create the illusion of consensus (Sontag, p.6).

What appears so bothersome to many observers about the recent photo manipulation of burning buildings in Beirut is that manufacture of the “WE” was so poorly executed.

Why did the photographer feel compelled to make the damage appear worse than it was? 

Perhaps the photographer, Adnan Hajj, believed that making the damage appear worse is what his patrons (be it Reuters or Hezbollah) wanted the viewers to see?  This is the imaginary "WE" that operates in the background of human consciousness.

Hajj’s manipulations are failed attempts at constructing a societal “WE”. He just did it really poorly.

The pictures were manipulated to emphasize the US against THEM commonsense viewpoint. The pictures are meant to agitate and solicit empathy, but they are also reiterate mythology (David and Goliath), or peddle an underdog ideology.

Hajj’s picture threatened to pull the curtain back on the ways people perceive the conflict just like TOTO in exposing the all-too-humanness of the less than all-powerful Wizard of Oz.

Bloggers, just like little TOTO, pulled the curtain back on the vulnerability of constructing and peddling one particular truth about the conflict. 

In the political endgames that come with all war, any visual truth  must be suspect, be it by the photographer or a government with an ideology to sell.

The camera may mimic reality but it is the photographer and the viewer that must negotiate the truth that emerges.

The “WE” that is constructed as an image of this war is but part of a larger pretense – something that goads the audience to believe in one view of the experience -- one perspective of reality -- one carefully crafted truth. 

Lewis’ question – “What, after all, do we believe when we believe that a photograph is true?”

Lewis’ question is a taunt -- a wordsmith's turn of a phrase.

Ultimately, there is no such animal as a photographic truth. 

Horrible things happen in the world everyday and there are photographers who record them, but the truth is only believable if we use to make it so.   

The last few weeks have proved to be quite troubling for many observers of the media, especially the field of photojournalism.

The level of public scrutiny now given to images by the general public, especially on the Internet, is unprecedented. Political interests on all sides of the Middle East conflict are holding the social conscious of this nation hostage. Increasingly, audiences are called upon to become more visually literate when interpreting news images. News photography, which at one time maintained at least the perception of validity and truthfulness, is being undermined by a growing throng of disbelievers.

During the first two weeks of fighting between Hezbollah and Israel, media coverage has become suspect as cases of photo-digital manipulation, events staged for the camera, and captioning errors come more fully to light.  One blog, Zombietime, encourages readers to consider the importance of understand how images can be manipulated. The site offers tips on identifying four kinds of photographic fraud and lists the Associated Press, Reuters, and The New York Times as perpetrators.

Zombietime’s analysis of news photography concludes four types of common manipulations:

1. Digitally manipulating images after the photographs have been taken.

2. Photographing scenes staged by Hezbollah and presenting the images as if they were of authentic spontaneous news events.

3. Photographers themselves staging scenes or moving objects, and presenting photos of the set-ups as if they were naturally occurring.

4. Giving false or misleading captions to otherwise real photos that were taken at a different time or place.

The speed and immediacy of the Internet enables critics, on the left and the right of center, to identity, denounce, and defend news imagery that would otherwise go unnoticed by the masses. News organizations are responding to catch and punish any transgressors that undermine the integrity of the Fourth Estate, but they may be too late.   

Dozens of conservative bloggers including, Michelle Malkin, Times Watch, and Little Green Footballs have been relentlessly scouring the Internet to find examples of media manipulation.

A recent analysis of how the media was manipulated after the Israeli bombing of Qana Lebanon illustrates this point brilliantly. In a short video the German news magazine Zapp shows how one rescuer, referred to as the Green Helmet, directs coverage of the events for the international press. Did Hezbollah choreograph the aftermath of the bombing to solicit outrage and sympathy in the Arab world? Many people believe that wide-scale manipulation of the press corps was and continues to be a reality.

Here is a link to a short survey on Photo-Digital Manipulation

 

The big question now is what happens to our historic collective memory if the images we view are continually the subject of disbelief? Will we become a nation of hate-mongering cynics?

For Hardt (1999), “Photographs, like all cultural products, have conditions and contexts that are based on historically determined cultural conventions, forms, beliefs, and perceptions.”

Despite the current uproar concerning the veracity of photojournalistic practices, there is still the question of how these images, manipulated or not, impact foreign policy decision. Is there anyway to truly calculate the impact pictures have on public perception? Was Israel's cease-fire after the bombing of Qana a sign that the government was reacting to outside pressure after millions of people around the world were subjected to pictures of the dead, especially children?

Following how the media covers an issue like the present conflict in the Middle East is a little like watching a tennis match. One side hits the ball and the audience turns its collective head toward where the ball might land. Then, there is the return, and the audience is driven back. This is the way news images are presented to us. One series of pictures showing the news of the day, all of them fairly similar in content.

Washington Post writer Peter Baker (2006) observes, “With each new scene of carnage in southern Lebanon, outrage in the Arab world and Europe has intensified against Israel and its prime sponsor, raising the prospect of a backlash resulting in a new Middle East quagmire for the United States, according to regional specialists, diplomats and former U.S. officials.”

This summer our Violence and Visual Culture class at Southern Oregon University tracked the first two weeks of the conflict in four newspapers. Students counted the number, size, placement, source, and characteristics of the content from July 14 through July 31 in The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Portland Oregonian, and the Medford Mail Tribune.

Some of the questions we were trying to answer included:

Are there significantly more images showing dead and dying Lebanese civilians than Israeli civilians? If so, why? If there are more pictures of dead Lebanese than Israeli would world outcry change policy?

The content analysis conducted by the class examines only the beginning of the conflict -- a period of time when most the pictorial representations of the destruction in Lebanon and Israel occurred.

A total of 186 images in all four papers, with the lion's share (n=105) depicted in The New York Times. 

Sixty-nine images depicted Lebanese civilians, while only 26 showed Israel civilians. In another area, 40 pictures showed Israel soldiers, while two images of Hezbollah fighters and 2 of Lebanese soldiers were used.

Can any conclusions be drawn from looking at images that play on the emotions of viewers?

 

Here are some data (early and unscrubbed) from the analysis. It would be interesting to have an online conversation about the possible implications of the role of images on public perception and foreign policy.

 

Photoshop: Propagandist's tool of choice

The Washington Times jumped on the Reuters bashing bandwagon this morning with an editorial criticizing the news agency for not noticing the obvious retouching of an image this week from Lebanon.

The editorial claims:

The important point here is that Mr. Hajj was doctoring his work for propaganda purposes. Part of Hezbollah's strategy is to outlast Israel until world opinion says the conflict has gone on long enough and it's time to quit with no punishment of the terrorists. As the terrorists in Iraq have figured out, one way to do that is by encouraging or playing up the inevitable civilian casualties. Hezbollah militants hide in Lebanese homes, while Hezbollah sympathizers in the media document the "disproportionate" Israeli military response to rockets fired from "peaceful" battery sites.

If you believe what The Washington Times is saying here, it looks like Reuters not only hired a photographer with poor photoshop skills, but that he is also Hezbollah sympathizer. 

The Times is using it's soapbox to make assertions and draw feable conclusions without any real evidence to support its claim. That's what opinions are, substantiated and biased accounts of some event, person, or thing.

According to Editor & Publisher, Gary Hershorn, a picture editor for Reuters,  believes that the freelancer Adnan Hajj did not manipulate the images for political purposes, but to only "make them better."

This is not the first time Hershorn has had to deal with questions of media bias. In September 2005, Mr. Hershorn edited an image of President Bush writing a note during a UN meeting.  By enlarging the image, the editor was scrunitized for publicizing a very human moment in the life of a very public figure.  With Hershorn's edit the content of the note became clear:
"I think I may need a bathroom break. Is this possible."

Although it would be difficult to say that Hershorn's focus on bringing the president's message into the public sphere, the Lebanonese issue doesn't seem to be making life any easier for the agency, especially in a world that already distrusts the media to a great extent.

Hershorn's defense of Hajj [the photographer in question] seems to steal a page out of the defensive public relations strategy book -- deflect, denounce, and deny.

Not only had Hajj manipulated the smoke coming from burning buildings in Beruit, but blogger Rusty Shackleford discovered the photog added a few extra flares fired from an Israel jet as well. Furthermore, conservative critics have accused Hajj and others of playing along with a Hezbollah propaganda scheme by staging the dramatic rescue of children in Beruit a last week.

To its credit Reuters is trying to respond to all the pressure it has been getting from its critics with what ever good graces it can muster. Editing policies have been tightened, the photographer fired, and all his pictures removed from circulation. Reuter's public apology and its attempts to not repeat the mistakes of the past week are commendable. In the end, transparency is the best defense against distrust and Reuters appears to be taking the initiative in this case.

At the same time, concerns over the ease in which the media can be manipulated by Hezbollah, Israel, or any other interest holder in the Middle East must remain in the public spotlight.

UPDATE: Cloning Lebanon: Outsourcing the Truth

As expected, folks have started to respond to my commentary on the recent Reuter's photo-manipulation situation.

Peter Clarke, Assistant Professor at Belmont Technical College wrote in response to my post with the following comment.

Professor Clarke notes:

"I feel a deep sense of sadness for the freelancer who probably didn't even know that he was doing anything wrong in the first place".  Are you kidding? You are being laughably naive.  Of course he knew he was doing something wrong!  He was trying to make the damage look worse than it was, regardless of who he was attempting to influence.

It is not the responsibility of the news agencies to provide for all of its freelancer's needs.  The freelancer is 'free' to take or leave the work, and the rate of pay or benefits he receives from Reuters or anyone else is his own personal concern.  Only by firing him will the message be reinforced to not 'doctor' photos, not by ensuring that freelancers have health insurance.  You're apparent good-heartedness is pathetically misplaced.

I think it is important to take my lumps on the perspective I presented in my previous post.

I am grateful to Professor Clarke for pointing out what he feels are feable ideas on my part. Maybe they are, but having a conversation about differing perspectives is what blogging is all about.

Although my statement about feeling "sad" for the freelancer may sound stupid and naive, I think it is important to look at the context in which this incident happened.

My point is simply that maybe the guy had an agenda to slant the news in the direction he wanted people to lean. That would be unethical and wrong without question. I don't feel sorry for anyone that would do that, but I do believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt.

The problem is that if he did have an agenda, why wasn't he called on it earlier?

Why did it take so long for him to be discovered by a blogger? The wire service, I claim, has a responsibility here and must be held accountable for selecting and training individuals that are willing to follow commonly accepted ethical standards.

Nevertheless, I do feel sorry for this guy. I feel sorry for him because he has become a scapegoat for an industry that has failed to make sure he wasn't using the power of the camera and all the technology that goes with it to tell us lies.

How many other pictures are being manipulated every day that we don't know about and who is ultimately responsible for allowing these images to slip through as representative of what can only be called a constructed social reality.

In the end my apparent good-heartedness may be pathetically misplaced, but I also think I might be pathethically misunderstood here. What I am getting at is that there are journalistic practices today that are being driven by economic concerns. This is what I need to make people understand -- journalism is a business run by businessmen.

What I am trying to say is that this industry must be made more accountable for providing us with information that can be trusted, despite what it may end up costing them. There are hundreds of well-trained photojournalists in this country that would love to have the opportunity that the freelancers have, yet will never do so for a variety of reasons.

Cloning Lebanon in Context

Here is the photo that has led to a storm of controversy in mass media world, especially in the blogosphere.

According to the BBC, "The news agency Reuters has withdrawn from sale 920 pictures taken by a photographer [adnan hajj],after finding he had doctored two images taken in Lebanon."

Click here to take a survey on photo manipulation.

Despite the reaction and response to the recent manipulation of a Reuters image, many people are missing an important issue.

Over the past few decades the MSM has come to depend on outsourcing many of its most dangerous reporting assignments to in-country freelancers -- people who take far more risks, are paid less, far less educated, and far more likely to be treated like disposable commodities than their Western colleagues.

The big picture issue here is more about the political-economics of doing business in times of war, than it is about one person's journalistic integrity. Let's get this straight. 

One of the most important issues facing the media today is credibility, yet Western wire services continue to utilize labor practices that exploit people.

Shouldn't wire services and the editors who work for them be held as equally accountable to the public as the photographer?

What needs to be discussed here is the reality that our wire services  exploit freelancers who end up assuming all the risk of working in extremely dangerous situations. Consider for a moment the number of Iraqi journalists, many of them working for Western news agencies, that have died in the past four years. In-country photojournalists, be it in Iraq or Lebanon, risk their lives every day so that we can be better informed.

The reality of the situation is that these freelancers are typically paid far less than Western photojournalists, become targets of political reprisals, and are rarely covered by any sort of health insurance policy.

In this case, even if the freelancer is fired and all his or her pictures removed from circulation, the wire services will inevitably hire another freelancer with the same language, cultural, and technological skills to take his place.

Firing the freelancer is a knee-jerk, sort of "cover our butts", reaction to a even more insidious situation that has been overlooked in the industry for decades. Outsourcing what is the equivalent of photo-mercenaries in order to save money and Western lives.

Freelancers need the same training, pay, educational opportunities, and health coverage as any other human being needs in this sort of situation. However, all of this costs money, and the bottom line in the news business these days is pretty much do news fast and do news cheap.

The message that Reuters is sending to the public by firing the freelancer is that they can be counted on to take care of individuals who make them look bad. I feel a deep sense of sadness for the freelancer who probably didn't even know that he was doing anything wrong in the first place.

What needs to the discussed here is the bigger and meatier issue of  how the wire services out source the most dangerous and difficult assignment to freelancers who are more or less treated like a disposable commodity.

Even though Reuters publicly apologized for the picture that got out, where were editors who cleared the image for distribution?  In this case, a first-grader could have done a better cloning job on the image, and at the end of the day it is the editors, not just the photographer, that have failed us. What we need now is an honest discussion about the use of in-country hires and freelancers by media giant who exploit them in order to feed the beast that our insatiable appetite for images in this country has become.

We should not, in this case, be shooting the messenger (the freelancer), but rather the companies that fail to educate their content providers in understanding the importance of balanced, fair-minded, and ethical visual practices.

Cloning Lebanon

Photojournalists on the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) list-serv were busy chatting it up last week.  Much of the conversation centered on the firing of Charlotte Observer photographer. Then, an image appear on Yahoo.news that is just know becoming news. Apparently, a Reuters freelancer in Lebanon cloned some patches of smoke. The picture has since been removed by the agency. Oooops, anyway here we go again.

 

Reality is as slippery as an eel in oil. To its credit, Reuters pulled or “killed” the photo once it became clear that it was manipulated. Eliana Johnson writing for the New York Sun reported:

“The photographer who supplied the picture, Adnan Hajj, has worked for Reuters on a freelance basis since 1993. Mr. Hajj "denied deliberately attempting to manipulate the image, saying he was trying to remove dust marks and that he made mistakes due to the bad lighting conditions he was working under," Reuters said.”

On one hand, it is good news that the media acts responsibly in these cases. On the other hand, where are the checks and balances on as far as post-production processes?  Since reporters have fact-checkers, editors, to verify that was is reported is accurate, why shouldn’t photographers. The problem with Mr. Hajj’s manipulation in this instance is that we don’t know how many other altered images have slipped by the gatekeepers. Most likely, Mr. Hajji is an in-country hire, which brings up another major issue in terms of credibility for Western audiences.

Increasingly wire services have had to rely on freelancers familiar with knowledge of the language, culture, and country to obtain images. Freelancers, by the way, also cost a lot less than using staff, which makes them even more valuable.

Sometimes, in-country hires and freelancers do not adhere to the same ethical standards and visual practices as Westerners. For example, in Latin America during the 1980s and 1990s it was quite common for photographers at competing newspapers to share images if one of them had missed an event. The absent photographer would simply put his or her name on the borrowed picture. The thought here was that the favor would be eventually returned.

The big question photographers seem to be asking, especially after analyzing digital manipulation policies at the Observer as well as the NPPA code of conduct, is how can the industry clarify and concisely define what it means by manipulation?

Digital manipulation, it is commonly believed, constitutes an activity that alters the meaning of the original image. In other words, photographers should NOT take things out or put things into a picture that weren’t there to begin with. Photographers should not alter the tone and color of an image beyond what was acceptable in pre-digital days. How many young photographers actually know what those standards represent?

In the past decade, there has been sufficient evidence to conclude that post-production processes, i.e., digital manipulation, has ranged from overt and intentional deception to the more pervasive subjective subtle adjustments of tone and color of an image.

This sort of after the fact scenario appears to be increasing. Now the question becomes what to do about it.  I have created a very short survey on this topic and hope you might take a few minutes to respond. I'll post the results in a few days. Feel free to pass the survey around to others.

Click here to take survey

Poking Fun of Politicos, Internet Humor, and Myth

There is no telling, for the moment, if this picture is a fake. It's almost too ironic to not be a fabrication. Nevertheless, the image becomes important as it is contribute to the cultural pathology of myth-making. The myth that the president is stupid or an idiot comes to us in many forms, but images that pass for news pictures are particularly problematic. Like the World Trade Center "Tourist Guy" picture, there is no shortage of Internet art that turns a serious situation in a joke. The idea that millions of people around the world are no receiving an email showing Bush peering through binoculars with the lens caps still on plays to our more cynical side. Our emotional reaction is to laugh, but if the moment is factual -- not a digital manipulation -- then the laughter may turn to tears.

Myths and Realities: The challenge of understanding what a picture means

Sometimes our ways of looking at things become so familiar to us that we miss the bigger picture.

 

In class, we discussed a content analysis we had started earlier in the week, which evaluates the impact of images on foreign policy in the Israeli-Lebanese conflict.

As a way of explaining the nature of content categories, I went Online to compare pictures on two Websites. The first Website selected was Al Jazeera and the second was Fox News. Both sites offer photo slideshows of the conflict and gave us a chance to deliberate about content categories.

Some of the categories we developed included civilians, soldiers, structural damage, location, focal length, and other dimensions. 

What we discovered in the process of physically counting the size, placement, location, and content of each image from the newspapers was that many of our early assumptions and perceptions were false. But, more about that later.

I am fascinated with how we might make meanings from the two images above.

The top picture from the Al Jazeera Website shows an Israeli tank on the move with a stop sign in the foreground. The bottom image, from Fox News, shows a bombed out building in Beirut with another stop sign in the foreground.

What meanings could be given to having stop signs foregrounding the primary signifiers – the tank or the buildings? Could the stop signs merely be convenient visual elements to help make the pictures more aesthetic or could we read a bit of the photographer's personal opinion in the frame?  If the latter is true, are there any implications in understanding photographic veracity?

First and foremost, there are many possible readings to any picture.

If we take the commonsense viewpoint the content in these two frames are simply what they represent – A tank approaching an intersection with a stop sign or a stop sign in an urban center with rubble in the background.

From the commonsense viewpoint we rely on the literal meaning of what is signified, and we do not read any more into the frame than what it tells us denotatively. The commonsense viewpoint allows us to avoid thinking about the photographer’s motivations and opinions. After all, if the pictures were to read from a political viewpoint, then, they would probably belong on the opinion page and not considered straight news.

Moving beyond the commonsense viewpoint, we might arrive at something more oppositional and controversial.

From the perspective of the Arab world, the stop sign and the tank may signify a demand, plea, or suggestion. “Stop the tanks.”

From the perspective of the Western world, the stop sign and the building also connote a similar message. “Stop the bombing.”

What makes the relationship between the signifier and signified in news imagery more salient are the words that anchor meaning to the pictures in the form of captions. Without the textual interpretations captured in cutlines, we are left to our devices to make sense of the scenes. However, when we read what the pictures represent for the journalists who assign primary readings to them, everything changes.

In this week’s Newsweek magazine, Evan Thomas and Andrew Romano look at how myths are made in our culture. Myths, the writers argue, are not about lies, but more about narratives and stories that explain realities.

“Myths are a peculiar hybrid of truth and falsehood, resentments and ambitions, dreams and dread. We all have personal myths running through our heads, and some chapters would withstand fact checking while others would fail miserably.”

How do images contribute to the human proclivities of mythmaking?

I am inclined to believe that images, especially news images, play a very important role in creating and maintaining myths in a visually dominant culture. Because pictures play upon our emotions as well as our reason, it seems only natural to suspect a link between how some images may build meaning that go far beyond the original occurrence. 

Signs of summer

A camera never lies, but people can

Donald Winslow, of the National Press Photographers Association, has a very coherent take on visual ethics in photojournalism after two recent cases of digital photographic manipulation came to light.

A question of truth: Photography and visual ethics.

The Optics of This War

Yesterday, the radio program Open Source with Christopher Lydon, jumped into an issue that I have been writing about over the past week -- images and the politics of images as they impinge on public consciousness as well as foreign policy.

Here are some of the questions Lydon poses to his guests , Marc Lynch, Annia Ciezadlo, and James Der Derian about the current Israeli-Lebanese war:

       1. How important are the optics of this war, and who’s managing them better?

       2. What links can we draw from the outcome of the actual fighting to media coverage, public opinion and ultimately diplomacy?

       3. Is Hezbollah’s goal in this conflict territory and a prisoner exchange, or is it sympathy and support, the kind that rushes in from the wider Muslim world as the images from Qana begin to spread?

       4. Children are dying in apartment blocks in Haifa, too; how does Israel win the diplomatic game when it’s fighting to a draw on the ground and losing the war of images?

Each question requires detailed analysis, but  what I would like to point out here is  the notion of visual determinancy and the limitations of photography to  convey the moral complexities of conflict.

Fortunately, an expanding body of literature in the field of images of war may help to more insightfully explicate the issues at hand.

The importance of the optics of this war, or any modern conflict, is increasingly obvious to many observers as well as foreign policy makers.  David Perlmutter, in his book Photojournalism and Foreign Policy, addresses this issue extensively. For Perlmutter, “Sometimes a general ‘CNN effect’ subsuming the flood of imagery and its instantaneousness and vividness is ascribed as being able to influence, affect, or drive foreign policy” (5).

Certainly images from Vietnam, such as the street execution of a Viet Cong prisoner or the naked child fleeing her burning village after a Napalm air strike, contributed to U.S. foreign policy decision following a buildup of public outcry against the war. In addition, China was force to reconsider how it was dealing with the democracy movement at Tiananmen in 1989 following the release of a protestor standing in front of a line of tanks. Further, in1994, pictures showing dead U.S. soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by an angry mob became visual determinants in how that conflict was being managed.

The optics of war is driven by the images immediacy, intensity, and intimacy. Anchored by the saliency of headlines, images of war take on an ideological dimension that is often perceived as more forceful than written accounts.

According to Perlmutter:

News photographs are remarkably selective windows on the world. The myriad other vista of reality and events that occur beyond the range of the lens, the eye of the photographer, or the scope of the newscast or newspaper, are ignored.

Not only are images selective windows on the world, they comprise an ideological constellation of meaning that contribute to how we think, feel, and act. Pictures, as representative anecdotes of an event, may help to sum up an event but they may not move us beyond looking.

One explanation in terms of who is managing the optics or war better – Israel or Hezbollah – must explore the emotional and intellectual appeal of the content. Pictures of Israeli artillery firing off salvos against an unseen enemy do not have the same emotional and intellectual appeal as images of dead Lebanese children.

As Sontag contends, "Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. And photographs are a species of alchemy, for all that they are prized as a transparent account of reality" (Regarding the Pain of Others, page 81).

The frequency and immediacy of pictures of dead children elicit sympathy as well as outrage from viewers in ways that pictures of Israeli troop movements, artillery, or the distant shots buring buildings in Beirut cannot.

In this case, the repetition and numbers of images depicting the human cost of Israeli air strikes and bombardment allows for Hezbollah to take control in what is becoming a war of images as it is a war of fighting armies.

From an academic perspective, claiming that Hezbollah is winning a propaganda war based on anecdotal evidence is unsatisfactory. What needs to be examined here is a direct relationship or correlation between public opinion and the number, placement, and frequency of such images?

Photography, as a subtractive medium, can restrict our understanding what is happening by constraining our view of reality. When we are bombarded by pictures of dead Lebanese children our visual activity becomes concentrated by the emotional impact of an event framed by the photographer.

At the same time, news organizations visually respond predictably to the stories they put on their front pages. For example, most of Today's Front Page show an overwhelming number of newspapers using cliche hot weather pictures -- mostly people throwing water over their heads.  In the history of modern newspaper design images  reflect the spotlighting or highlighting of one series of events over another. In this instance, the picture may not be the same, but repeatedly the message is.

The majority of these pictures are showing us little other than something we already know, but nevertheless, editors feel obligated to visually represent the moment that otherwise could be said in one word -- HOT. The pictures, in this case, apologize for a lack of news beyond what most people are already experiencing.

Getting back to the problem of analyzing images from the Israeli-Lebanese conflict, I think it is important to remind ourselves of what Sontag observes:

"Central to modern expectations, and modern ethical feeling, is the conviction that war is an aberration, if an unstoppable one. That peace is the norm, if an unattainable one. This, of course, in not the way war has been regarder throughout history. War has been the norm and peace the exception" (74).

Considering this perspective, the visual determinancy of the frame contributes in many ways to this expectation -- that peace is the norm, or at least it is something that "ought" to be.

Looking again at the questions:

What links can we draw from the outcome of the actual fighting to media coverage, public opinion and ultimately diplomacy?

To be honest, without actually physically counting the number of images used, and without considering the content, placement, size, caption, and headline, we can conclude very little. All we are left with is an impression or the sense that there is a link between what the images show us and the public's reaction to them.  Our interpretation of an image is fallible, just like any experience -- direct or indirect [thank you Charles for the clarification].

Since this conflict continues to escalate, it become imperative to suspend our inclination to rush to some conclusion in terms of impacting foreign policy. At the same time, clearly Israeli 48-hour cease-fire could be linked to the flood of gore and destruction after killing 56 people in Lebanon.

International condemnation of the attack in this case has given the Israeli government pause in rethinking how it manages its message in the foreign press. This can be seen already by examining the number of stories turning the violence back on Hezbollah's alledged use of civilians as human shield. Unfortunately, we haven't seen any pictures of guerrillas holding civilians gunpoint while they position their rockets against Israeli targets. All we get in the media is fingerpointing on both sides.

At issue is whether we can accept the commonsense viewpoint offer to us from one side or another. Ultimately, without having any visual evidence that this is the case we are left with only words to decide what is right and truthful.

Why Scholars Should Blog

It is quite clear that there are risks involved in blogging as a form of scholarship in progress -- risks that are more about exposing ideas not yet fully developed than anything that could pass as rigorous academic discourse at this point.  In academe, the old adage "publish or perish" continues to remain a salient mantra for most.

Professors on tenure-track are often warned about the perils of deviating from antecedent practices and traditions that have fairly strict conventions in terms of who will earn tenure. The value of publishing a letter to the editor, for example, is not given the same weight as publishing research in a scholarly peer-reviewed journal. All of this makes perfect sense, but where do professors who maintain active blogs fit in? Many edubloggers spend many hours maintaining blogs, collecting ideas and material, and responding to comments. What is the value of such practices?

As a former journalist, I justify the risks of blogging about academic ideas with the belief that the rewards of engaging people in a broader and deeper conversation about what we see and how things are made to be see is more far more interesting, relevant, and exciting.

The objective of writing in the moment on a blog is about engaging others -- students, teachers, professionals, and the general public -- in a more or less real-time conversation about the impact of images on society.

Some academics argue that scholarly energies are better served if one spends time researching, writing, and sending off articles to peer-reviewed journals. Again this make sense, but I also believe that there is room for both the ivory tower and the soap box in today's media illiterate world. Not only is there room for blogging from an educational perspective, but there is also a tremendous need to train the general public to move beyond a so-called commonsense viewpoint offered up in the mainstream press today. The commonsense viewpoint, in this case, refers to how so many of us refuse to question "news" as presented as "truth" by much of the mainstream media.

Scholars, with years of academic training behind them, are in a unique position to engage the public inside and outside of the classroom in new ways. Through an educational blog, scholars can provide readers with the intellectual tools required to engage in higher levels of analysis  and discourse.   

This past week has been a case study in how effective educational blogging can be. It has also been a watershed moment in my education as a teacher.
 

As I have engaged in a daily analysis of images from the war between the Hezbollah in Lebanon and Israel, several readers have commented on my analysis and even questioned my logic. Good for everyone that have been taking the time to engage in this conversation.

Thanks to Charles who has been graciously challenging me to clarify my interpretation of Whitehead's symbolism, as well as to Karin who asks, "How do you suggest that picture editors choose a picture/s to represent this situation?"

The objective of this exercise has always been about helping myself and others to understand the power of the visual in society. More recently, with the conflict raging in the Middle East, I have become more of an activist in terms of visual literacy. The first step of this process has been to engage others in learning to apply a variety of perspectives to the war of images currently being played out across the front pages of our nation's newspapers.