Dennis Dunleavy

Rumsfeld's new media realities

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in an interview with CNN's Frank Sesno today, offers an interesting glimpse into how our leaders feel about technology and the challenges of communication in an age of immediacy.

We are at the juncture of the end of the Cold War still and the entrance into the 21st century where the challenges will be, in large measure, asymmetric and irregular, as opposed to conventional. We're conducting the first war in the 21st century at a time when these new media realities exist. You've got 24-hour talk radio. You've got bloggers. You've got the Internet. You've got e-mails. You've got digital cameras. You've got Sonycams. And everyone knows everything instantaneously. Only it isn't everything, because it's out of context. It is scraps and pieces that then they have to digest; the world has to digest and take aboard.
 
That is a new experience for everyone. And as I say, there isn't a road map for how you do it in there. But one thing's pretty clear to me, that some of those institutions and some of those arrangements that we have need to be changed if we're going to do well in the 21st century. They served us well throughout that period from the '50s on, but it's a different world today. It's a very dynamic world. It's a fast-moving world. And we're going to have to have adjustments made to those institutions.

The institutions, Rumsfeld appears to be speaking about here are largely those within the government, especially in the areas of national security and defense. At the same time, Rumsfeld might also have in the back of his mind the military's relationship with institutional media.

As Rumsfeld considers the issue of immediacy through the advance of technologies, there is a clear understanding that communicative processes, personal or mediated, depend largely on context.

As suggested, "... everyone knows everything instantaneously. Only it isn't everything, because it's out of context. It is scraps and pieces that then they have to digest; the world has to digest and take aboard."

Considering the body of evidence after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, those "scraps and pieces" that Rumsfeld is hinting at carry considerable consequence. I find it hard to look at the prison abuse pictures and see just "scraps and pieces." What I see are images that build critical mass as a visual narrative -- one suggesting unprecedented arrogance and disdain for a humanity that differs from our own.

For people in power, dominance is predicated on establishing and maintaining control over the message. After the Abu Ghraib prison scandal came to light, what maintaining control means to Cold War Warriors is that the potential for the wrong messages getting out have become monumental.

What scares people in power most is that people with less power will find ways to challenge them. In today's world information is power. The increasing array of technologies that convey information immediately threatens to  undermine the static and hierarchal dominance of many social institutions, from the classroom to the battlefield.

 

When Iconic Images Become Meaningless

I read a provocative article this morning from Slate senior editor Dahlia Lithwick concerning the Abu Ghraib prison images -- pictures that once stung the conscience of this nation, and that now have lost their sting.

Lithwick writes with remarkable clarity when she argues that "Yesterday's disgrace is today's ordinary, and that—with a little time and a little help from the media—we can normalize almost anything in the span of a few short years."

In fact, the passage of the president's detainee bill in the Senate will put into law, and make legal, what horrfied so many in the pictures only three years ago.

Remember those incredibly real pictures of naked and humiliated prisoners being the subject of torture? Remember the dog attacking a terrified Iraqi or the guard pulling a prisoner along with a leash around his neck?

What has happened to the power of an image as its becomes stuffed into the recesses of memory? Why do these pictures no longer make us cry or scream with outrage?

With time pictures -- especially iconic images -- come to mean different things for different people. Take the Abu Ghraib prison pictures for example. What these images may mean to many Americans three years later is quite different than what they mean to al Queda operatives seeking new recruits in Iraq.

Terror has a funny way of creeping into popular culture -- just ask Jack Bauer, a.k.a Mr. Torture, of the hit television series "24". Americans have  an freakish fascination with pain and humiliation, especially when it enters the fertile imagination through film, television, and video games.

The Narrative of the Frame

The power of the image resides in movement -- finding a center of action focused on a tension or confrontation. The action -- with its dominant center of focus -- along with  all subsequent reactions produce the compelling image.

It is this movement that carries the narrative arc of the frame -- one  which appeals to the intellectual and emotional imagination of the viewer. The narrative unfolds with all the elements of drama including rising, climax, and falling action.

For Love of Light and Life

I just finished a short essay for an exhibition featuring the work of photojournalist David Burnett at the Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, Oregon.

I feel pretty good about this piece and thought I would share it here.

For Love of Light and Life

     Photojournalism has always been about the relationship between light and life. It is a complex and fully human way of capturing, describing and explaining to others what words often fail to do. From this perspective, photojournalism signifies a social and empathic visual encounter with "reality," one that is capable of accentuating the textured fabric of the human condition with dignity, grace, and compassion.

The skilled photojournalist responds to the world emotionally and intellectually by documenting people, places, and things with honesty and humility. The power of photojournalism resides in its insistence on being a holistic and humanistic enterprise. The photojournalist, in turn, must be faithful to a moment of truth, as he or she encounters the world. Photojournalism, at its best, goads us into considering more consciously events that affect our lives.

Today, we are socially conditioned to a deluge of photojournalistic impressions that meet the eye daily, from the run-of-the-mill to the iconic. Within our visually pervasive culture, photojournalism remains committed to documenting the immediacy and intimacy of life as it unfolds around the corner and across continents.  Photojournalism is about telling stories with a camera – it is a way of allowing the viewer to see beyond the picture-making process by entering into and connecting with humanity and the world as it is fixed within our collective memory of place and time. The photographer’s eye informs, constructs, and shapes social reality. As eyewitness to the tumult and triumph of human endeavor, major and minor, the photographer’s truth – the image – fixes and mediates a moment of time, not only as a representative anecdote, but also as a reality.

The photojournalist’s eye is informed by the principle of the decisive moment, an expression coined by photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson to sum up his feelings about the convergence of critical visual elements in time and space. For Bresson, “Sometimes there is one unique picture whose composition possesses such vigor and richness, and whose content so radiates outward from it, that this single picture, is a whole story in itself. But this rarely happens.”  Most photojournalists require many years of practice to capture the decisive moment, for the formula for constructing such pictures is chiefly governed by an individual’s ability to anticipate and react to what is placed before lens.  For this reason, much of what viewers perceive as news is predicated on the photographer’s capacity to capture the decisive moment – the peak, climactic, and otherwise dramatic composition representative of the event.

However, reducing an event to a single fixed moment in time can be problematic. From this perspective, images produced through the decisive moment style may fail to explain a complex array of factors leading up to and after the picture has been captured.

More for than four decades, photojournalist David Burnett has traveled the world in search of moments of truth. In his exhibition, “Measures of Time”, Burnett’s pictures epitomize the precision and process that helped to define the culture of photojournalism, both as an occupational group as well as a form of creative expression.

Burnett’s work reflects some of the more salient and emblematic moments of the latter-half of the twentieth century.  In this exhibit, Burnett’s style captures the “vigor and richness” of light and life that Cartier-Bresson so often highly prized. Burnett is a master of the decisive moment, but he is also a conscientious observer – someone given to a minimalist approach that emphasizes an appreciation for understanding the underpinning social and political context of an event.

Burnett’s images have a strong and definitive center of focus – framed by the carefully composed geometry of light and shadow. The pictures before us demand our attention because they force us to recall events and people from our past as well as our present. This is what news images require of viewers – pictures give us pause to think, feel, and hopefully move us toward compassion and caring. Burnett's photographs, however, do not only reflect a high level of photographic technical and compositional skill, they also serve as ideological and sociological benchmarks of our culture. Therefore, the pictures become interesting and valuable not only based on aesthetic appeal, but also for the context in which they were made.

In an article discussing the use of large format (single frame) cameras in sports photography, Burnett keenly observes a process that is evident in all of his work: “Waiting and watching is the key….The sense of discipline, the patience to wait, and capture ‘The Moment’. Sometimes you get it, as in all photography, and most often you don't.” 

Fortunately, for us, and for the photographer, there are many more moments grandly captured than casually missed.

The War on Visual Credibility

I wrote the following piece last week for a terrific new Website called "Subtitled."

According to editor Phillip Ennemoser, Subtitled is a small group of art students from Salzburg University, Austria. Currently the students are engaged in establishing "a permanent resource for global reportage photography; the focus is on online galleries, portrays of photographers, exhibition, festival and book reviews as well as on a growing network."

Educators thinking about going online to extend learning beyond the four walls of the university classroom might well consider Subtitled as an exemplary model of innovative and engaged learning.

                     

Audience Expectations of Images as Truth

Visual content in news production, over the past 100 years, has been shaped by several underlying pressures, which include but may not be limited to, consumer culture, social tastes, economic and ideological interests, moral and ethical judgments, antecedent practices in journalism, technological innovations, and the social psychological behaviors of news creators and consumers.

In other words, to understand the deeper structural and personal processes underpinning the visual consumption of information as news we must consider a range of behaviors, both of the visual journalist as well as the visual consumer. Therefore, it becomes imperative to reflect on what constitutes a real or truthful representation of an event as displayed, portrayed, and distributed in mass media, be it online or in print. Today, we call upon students, educators, professionals, and the general public to challenge and question all forms and means of media production and consumption, including the array of decision-making processes and behaviors that have been previously left unexamined.

Images consumed as authenticate and representative depictions of reality govern the production of the conventions and traditional standards of content – visual material that is informed and motivated by a individual, institutional, and societal expectations and obligations.

For example, audiences expect news images to be made without the insertion of personal or political bias, and therefore, it logically follows that the journalist may feel obligated to comply. This assumption appears, on the surface, fairly straight forward, but the reality is far more complex and problematic. Visual credibility means that the people who make images, as well as those who eventually view them, establish and maintain an implied social contract of trust, for better or worse. In this case, the social contract between source and user implies a sense of confidence in the authenticity of the process.

Trust , in this case, refers to not only what the audience expects to see in a picture, but also what journalists feel obligated to present. Audience expectations of visual reportage from the on-going conflicts around the world in the New York Times or Le Monde, may differ greatly from those representations aired on Fox News, SKY News, or even Al-Jazeera. What do audiences expect to see when they look at news images in the visual reportage of the news? How practical is it to believe that such reportage could ever be completely free of personal, institutional, corporate, or societal biases?

Although this may appear to be an obvious and naïve line of questioning, audience expectations of how news is framed and socially constructed for us exists on a visual continuum determined by the source ability to engage in a process that maintains facticity, actuality, verifiability, balance, institutional credibility, accuracy, bias, objectivity, and the perceived neutrality of the observer over time.

Until recently, audience expectations of visual credibility appeared to be a seriously under examined area of media criticism. Looking at what different audiences expect to see in news images in terms of efficacy and saliency may help to better predict how visual information contributes to the creation and implementation of major foreign policy decisions.

The credibility of a news source is largely a matter of perception, real or imagined. Audiences imbue a news source such as Le Monde, El Pais, The New York Times or Fox with credibility as something to be valued over long periods of time. Given the rise of increasingly hostile and aggressive elements on the Internet criticizing not just one or two visual news accounts, but the veracity of all images, present inordinate challenges for traditional news sources.

The credibility of news photographs is often based on the assumption that what we are looking at is provided to us as a truthful representative of an occurrence – free from bias or manipulation. Unfortunately, a priori assumptions like this one have fallen victim to the politics of authority – a politics where all images and their sources become suspect. The veracity of the visual in our culture, despite its checkered history, is tied, however, to an even larger culture of capitalism and consumption.

In a state of advanced capitalism establishing and maintaining bases of power encroaches on public trust. Mass media cannot escape the paradox of attempting to earn public trust, while it caters to corporate and political interests. In order to make informed decisions in our lives, there is no substitute for accurate and balanced information. The implications of a public turned against the press because all faith has been lost in its ability to function openly and honesty in society is becoming a dreaded reality.

The Decisive Moment: The Course of Human History as the Eye Sees It

Photojournalism has always been about the relationship between light and life. Photojournalism is a complex and fully human way of capturing, describing and explaining to others what words often fail to do. From this perspective, photojournalism signifies a social and empathic visual encounter with "reality," one that is capable of accentuating the textured fabric of the human condition with dignity, grace, and compassion.

The skilled photojournalist responds to the world emotionally and intellectually by documenting people, places, and things with honesty and humility. The power of photojournalism resides in its insistence on being a holistic and humanistic enterprise. The photojournalist, in turn, must be faithful to a moment of truth, as he or she encounters the world. Photojournalism, at its best, must goad the viewer to consider see deeply and consciously into the lives of the poor and the powerful, the living and the dying.

Today, we are socially conditioned to the deluge of photojournalistic impressions that meet the eye daily, from the run-of-the- mill to the iconic. Within our visually pervasive culture, photojournalism remains committed to documenting the immediacy and intimacy of life as it unfolds around the corner and across continents. 

Photojournalism is about telling stories with a camera – it is a way of allowing the viewer to see beyond the picture-making process by entering into and connecting with humanity and the world as it is fixed within our collective memory of place and time. The photographer’s eye informs, constructs, and shapes social reality. As eyewitness to the tumult and triumph of human endeavor, major and minor, the photographer’s truth – the image – fixes and mediates a moment of time not only as a representative anecdote as well as a reality.

Photojournalism extends our visual encounters with the world beyond the blare of a quickly forgotten headline or the triviality of a sound bite. The photojournalist’s eye is informed by the principle of the decisive moment, an expression coined by photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson to sum up his feelings about the convergence of critical visual elements in time and space.

As Bresson suggests, “Sometimes there is one unique picture whose composition possesses such vigor and richness, and whose content so radiates outward from it, that this single picture, is a whole story in itself. But this rarely happens.”

Most photojournalists develop the skills needed to capture the decisive moment through practice, for the formula for constructing such pictures, is chiefly governed by an individual’s ability to anticipate and react to what is placed before lens.  For this reason, much of what viewers receive as news is predicated on the capture of a decisive moment – the peak, climatic, and otherwise dramatic composition representative of the event.

Since the beginning of modern photojournalism, about the time of the death of the original LIFE magazine in the early 1970s, the decisive moment has driven photojournalism education to a large extent. Students have been pushed to think that that if they missed the "moment" they missed the story.

Albeit a very salient concept, training photojournalists to think in terms of the decisive moment has meant less time could be spent on understanding communicative processes, ethics and emerging technologies.

With a rare exception, much of  photojournalism education has concerned itself with the application of desired skill sets, such as the decisive moment. Little attention, regrettably, has been directed toward the training photographers to think and act like reporters. In addition, little attention has been given to training photographers to understand the power and moral agency of their relationship with society.

Fortunately, photojournalism education has been changing in recent years. Many educators now have advanced graduate degrees and work toward integrating theory into their applied courses. More schools also require students to undertake writing and editing courses.

From this perspective, photojournalists will continue to be more ethically and critically trained --  they will be better able to attend to the business of visual storytelling in more meaningful ways.

Remembering 09.11.01

I wrote this piece about 9-11 shortly after the event. Today, I feel it's appropriate to remember the feelings I had then.

It is September 11, 2001 and the world has stopped.  Four skyjacked commercial airliners have crashed—two into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and the fourth into a wooded area near Pittsburgh. 

My family and I are camping among the redwoods of northern California, our last vacation together before returning to the day-to-day realities of graduate studies. For many years, as a photojournalist, covering news was a way of life for me. I can still vividly recall in 1992, photographing the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. And before this, there were nearly ten years of documenting conflicts in Central America and Southern Mexico. Now, somehow, this more recent event eclipses all others—it stings my moral conscience and political consciousness. It is loaded with unimaginable images of grief and despair that overwhelm my emotions.

Even though I am unplugged from the relentless stream of media, I have become accustomed to “there is no escaping the news” of what has happened thousands of miles away. Even though there is no Internet or television here—no America Online or Cable News Network  to construct what has happened for me, my mind actively seeks to make sense of things. At first, factual details of the tragedies are minimal, and I listen to the radio for hours as reporters speculate and ramble on ad nauseam about how they arrived on the scene, the color of the sky, or other non-essential information.  There seems to be little objectivity in pitch of voice or innuendo that follows. At the same time, it appears that reporters do not intentionally set out to mislead or misinform. Much of the work of newsgathering is mediated by access to facts and information from eyewitnesses and official sources. In the aftermath of the explosions, when thousands of people have perished, reporters scramble to produce coherent accounts as networks interrupt daily programming to bring to the world a continuous “live” feed from the scene. The pressure on journalists to get to the scene, find the right people to talk to, and make sense of events is enormous, and at times, produces more confusion than factual knowledge.

Perhaps it is best not to have the usual barrage of visually mediated messages from video and still photographs telling me the way it is. Instead, I am forced to concentrate and create my own mental images of the destruction. This process is intimate, personal and profoundly different from the plugged-in life I have constructed for myself. Like a monk in a cloister focused on prayer, I try to visualize the scene. I imagine what it must be like to be one of the hundreds of firefighters and other rescue workers trapped inside the collapsing World Trade Center. I try to imagine the carnage of torn flesh, twisted steel, acrid smoke, and shattered glass. I think about and imagine the fear on the faces of the passengers as the plane speeds toward impact. I imagine grieving family members—the shock, loss and emptiness. I imagine the chain of events that led up to such an act—one so desperate and so seemingly horrible that words and images cannot fully comprehend.

The words imagine, image, and imagination interest me a great deal. Even when we are provided an image of a jet crashing into a skyscraper we are still required to complete the scene, imagine, or construct a mental narrative through our imagination of what comes next, in this case death and destruction. The imagination is an active part of cognition and sometimes I think we often take it for granted. As I sit, tuned into the radio, there is little else to do but to listen and imagine. My mind is full of images. As I receive bits and pieces of information, I begin to construct a scenario of the events taking place that makes sense to me—one that is contingent upon my perception of reality. Part of this construction comes in the creation of mental pictures produced through the accounts of others: reporters, eyewitnesses, officials, and experts. At the same time, I rely upon my own working knowledge of New York City and Washington; I am dependent upon a collective social stock of knowledge, and the mind’s eye creates what I know from personal experience.

It is hopeless to imagine what death looks like when you are so far removed from the reality of daily events.  Sometimes death appears real only when it becomes relevant to my own existence, and somehow I could place myself on board a skyjacked airliner or in one of the buildings that collapsed after the crash. I am uncomfortable with the idea that this event shocks me more than others I read in the newspaper or see on television. For example, the destruction caused by Hurricane Mitch a few years ago, the embassy bombings in Africa, or even the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, seem somehow less on my scale of what can be categorized as horrific in my mind’s eye. All of these events were horrific, but the symbolism of these attacks and the uncertainty that follows makes it more relevant to everyday life.  Again, it is the imagination that creates the most primal desires and fears.   

The mental images that come to mind occur with only a minimal amount of media. I have not yet watched television, scanned the World Wide Web, or even opened a newspaper yet to understand what is happening. My only source of information is gleaned from the radio. In many ways, the mental images I create seem more real to me as I am forced to actively contemplate upon what little information I am aware of. But my mental images of the scene are as real as the constructed reality provided by the media, and based upon my social stock of knowledge and personal experience. In a way, without the illusion of this mediation reality provided by news images, I feel somehow more connected to the victims. Without the live video and wire photos, I actively construct, in my mind’s eye, a tableau vivant of the drama. Of course, some will argue the subjectivity of this experience, but it is nevertheless very real.  This is the psychological, emotional and intellectual response I create to the shock of the real. The panorama that is constructed in my mind’s eye is a cobble of mental pictures that intersect with the reality of my everyday life.

People, Places, and Photography

Through ritualized activities social relationships become more meaningful as they are actualized through routines common to individuals and groups. Photography, as a routine ritualized activity, acts as a catalyst for group cohesion and individual identity.

On a recent trip across Western Canada, tourists pulled along side the highway to grab a few visual mementos. Cameras appear magically has the cars come to a stop.

Outside, the first few steps are taken toward a guardrail overlooking a natural wonder – waterfalls, mountains, valleys, and canyons. People pose in seemingly choreographed routines before the camera with the vistas behind them. The relationship between people and famous places is fascinating. In a way, the photograph represents a ritualized act that consolidates and collects the emotional space created by the event.

It seems only natural that basic human need can be met through the ritualized activities of photography. The picture, before and after it is made, epitomizes the human desire to establish and maintain identity within and outside a group.

Pictures are about persuasion as much as they are about information

Consistently, newspaper frontpages, television news, and web sites select images that communicate to audiences a specific moment in time. These pictures tell stories, of course, but they are also selected and displayed to convince and persuade us to think, feel, and act in certain ways. This is sort of editing process and the design decisions that follow are all part of a rhetorical schema. Anchors by words, the pictures have persuasive determinancy that seek to push to attract, engage, and maintain interest in the story.

Sportsshooter Website Features commentaries on digital manipulation

Two weeks ago, I was asked to contribute an article to Sportsshooter, an online community of photojournalists and students interested in sports photography and other matters in the field. Thanks to Kim Komenich of the San Francisco Chronicle and Robert Hanashiro of USA today to allowing me to write more about photo manipulation in terms of what I have been finding on my survey. There are more than a dozen commentaries available on the site and it's exciting to see this level of engagement and concern.  Here's what I sent to Sportshooter:

Digital Manipulation: 'I believe the hiring of freelancers, in this case, may be partially responsible for the mess we now find ourselves in as professionals.'


In the weeks following revelations of digitally altered news photographs from the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, a great deal of criticism has been aimed at the practice of photojournalism.
 
Those who believe that photojournalism has failed in its mission to fairly and accurately report world events in this instance may feel justified, but is the profession doomed? Can public trust and credibility ever be restored, or was it ever there to begin with?
 
For the purposes of argument I would like to suggest that discussions involving the credibility and believability of photojournalism must be expanded beyond the blogospheric banter of manipulating images in Photoshop.
 
For many scholars, as well as professionals, this conversation remains important, but there is also a need to include other factors negatively influencing public attitudes toward the media in general and toward photojournalism specifically.
 
Photojournalists, in my opinion, must help educate the public to understand an array of complexities comprising visual reportage including, photo manipulation, subject/photographer interaction, as well as the socio-economic pressures facing the media today.
 
For decades, photojournalism has been challenged by the way in which technologies impinge on professional practices and conduct. Beyond technological considerations, however, there are a host of other ideological and sociological factors confronting professionals today. Not only should we be concerned with altering images, but we also must consider how easily photojournalists seem to be exploited by political and business interests.
 
In an on-going survey, conducted for my Weblog, respondents (n=421) reveal a variety of attitudes toward photojournalism.
 
Although not representative of any particular group, the survey calls attention to several concerns that have not completely surfaced in the current debate. Despite the focus on post-production alterations---adding and removing objects, darkening skies, etc., there are other issues involved in the creation of news content that deserve greater reflection as well as public attention.
 
For example, early in the debate, I wrote about how Western news services have become overly dependent on non-western-trained photojournalists for images.
 
Needless to say, this idea did not win much sympathy with professionals who believed that I should just stick to focusing on digital manipulation and not go deeper into the structural issues plaguing the media today.
 
For the sake of this argument, I would like to persist a bit further with this issue since I believe the hiring of freelancers, in this case, may be partially responsible for the mess we now find ourselves in as professionals.
 
Not all professional photographers share the same ideals and values.
 
Specifically, the practice of hiring of freelancers who have access to Hezbollah controlled areas in the conflict were not held up to the same level of ethical or professional scrutiny as their Western competitors. In the race to acquire images with the most impact, wire services put themselves into a difficult, but often very cost-effective, position of paying freelancers who may have political connections and biases.
 
The practice of hiring "in-country" freelancers for images that big news organizations find difficult to obtain for an array of reasons has been going on since the Vietnam War.
 
However, with the immediacy of the digital camera and the ability to transmit pictures instantly, conventional methods of editing and oversight have been set aside. At least this is what we are told was the case in at least two photo-manipulation cases. The practice of hiring freelancers in war zones makes sense to big cost-conscious news sources. Without being overly callous here, in-country freelancers are also seem incredibly disposable when compared to the life of a Western journalist. This is not necessarily a criticism of the individuals who risk their lives daily to provide the West with fresh reportage, but more of an indictment of commonplace business practices used by an industry obsessed with getting images, video, sound, and information on the cheap.
 
While we should condemn photojournalists, in the case of the Lebanese conflict, who mislead the public through poorly executed Photoshop skills; we must also look beyond individual behavior so that we can understand the social, political, economic structures embedded within corporate news organizations that are enabling this sort of behavior. Of course, it is much easier to condemn an individual for an indiscretion than it is to seek to change an entire industry.
 
About the Survey
 
Some of the more interesting findings on the survey to date suggest that a majority of respondents (83 percent) believe they have seen digitally altered pictures in the news within the past five years. More than 95 percent of people surveyed believe that adding or removing objects from a picture is a form of manipulating reality. At the same time, only 55 percent feel that changing the color of the sky to make a picture appear more realistic is a manipulation.
 
Interestingly, nearly 78 percent of respondents confided that a lot more photographers than most people believe have manipulated images in terms of altering content or changing the tone of the picture to make it more dramatic. This revelation, for me, suggests that the people who took the survey have may have become more cynical with the profession then in the past. This same group (88 percent) also revealed that they think news pictures can and do influence foreign policy decisions.
 
When asked if the general public doesn't care if a photographer alters an image to make it more dramatic, more than 70 percent disagreed. Respondents think the public does care if pictures are altered.
 
One of the more surprising results coming out of this study relates to whether people think photo-ops arranged for the media are a form of manipulation. In this small survey, 41 percent (n=131) agree, while another 27 percent (n=81) strongly agree. This means that neatly 70 percent of respondents feel that pictures that are managed and staged for the media are forms of manipulation.
 
Being a person that attempts to connect the dots whenever possible, it seems pretty clear to me now that definitions concerning forms of photographic manipulation need to be expanded upon and clarified by news organizations, professional groups, and the public as well.
 
Without considering the complexities involved in the visual practice of photojournalism that include but are not limited to pre-visualization, image capture, and post-production processes, public confidence in the profession may be impossible to regain in the near future.

Click here to take the survey

For Latest Results on the survey click here.

The characteristics of Photojournalism and ways of seeing the world

The photojournalist’s eye is informed by a principle often defined as the decisive moment. Photographer and artist Henri Cartier-Bresson coined the term "decisive moment" to describe the convergence of critical visual elements in time and space.

As Bresson suggests:

Sometimes there is one unique picture whose composition possesses such vigor and richness, and whose content so radiates outward from it, that this single picture, is a whole story in itself. But this rarely happens.The elements which, together, can strike sparks out of a subject, are often scattered -- either in terms of time and space -- and bringing them together by force is 'stage management,' and, I feel, cheating.

Bresson leaves us much to reflect on in the above passage. For Bresson, the world was about movement, and the photographer's work is to move with the world. However, Bresson was writing and photographing at a time when the techniques of visual reportage were still young and impressionable.

Today, in a world that seems overburdened with visual cliches and not-so-subtle visual anecdotes, much of the meaning of Bresson's decisive moment in photojournalism seems to have become rarefied and denuded of power.

With our collective appetite for "the moment", many news images seem to reduce events down to the equivalent of sound bites. How is the "decisive moment", as a visual phenomenon able to inform the viewer beyond the deft capture of an essence that is nothing more than a mnemonic device?

According to Wikipedia, "Sound bites are a natural consequence of people placing ever greater emphasis on summarizing ever-increasing amounts of information in their lives."

Unfortunately, many photojournalists develop the decisive moment as a  form of visual practice that often becomes formulaic. The decisive moment, in much of photojournalism, appears to be chiefly governed by an individual’s ability to anticipate and react to what is placed before lens.

For this reason, some critics of photojournalism contend that much of the practice is little more than craft, because  much of what is recorded is predicated on the capture of a decisive moment – the peak, climatic, and otherwise dramatic composition representative of the event.

As Bresson reminds us:

"Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes the precise and transitory instant... We cannot develop and print a memory."

In some ways what is most striking about the recent criticisms against photojournalism, particularly in tems of the coverage of the wars in the Middle East is that there is a profound lack of understanding of the field's historic development as well as its sociological qualities in the emergence of media consumption.

It would be silly to apologize for what is happening in photojournalism today as a craft or occupational group, but it is important to point out that the fundamental motivations driving visual behavior have not and probably will not change.

Images and objects of desire: For Couric's media handlers it's not about the News

Katie Couric stares out at us from the cover of a recent CBS magazine Couric exuding confidence and superiority, but she also radiates  sexuality.

Although entrusted with the responsibility of conveying national and international world events on the evening news, Couric is portrayed not as a news anchor, but also an entertainer, personality, and celebrity.

In our consumer-driven culture, televison news is subsumed by the renown, eminence, stardom, popularity, and notability of individuality. In this configuration, Couric is not a journalist -- she is a way for CBS to bring in more viewers for its advertising base. Therefore, the criticism here must be aimed at how news personalities are used not only becuase they are good at delivering the news, but also because people identify with them.

Since Couric is considered by corporate media as a product that can be sold, her identity, look, style, and personality are presented or packaged to engender in viewers a para social relationship. Images play a critical role in the promotion of TV news personalities. Since human beings are motivated by the need to feel a sense of belonging to something, images reenforce the emotional and pyschological connections made between observer and observed. Parasocial relationships descibe how viewers form and imaginary bonds with the star by identifying with them in some way. 

The editors of CBS Watch had a clear agdenda when they selected the pictures and designed the layout on Couric -- an agenda that was motivated more on playing to Couric's appeal as an object of desire.