There are several forms of favorable and unfavorable bias affecting public perception of the media in terms of digital manipulation. Here's a chart illustrating the possibilities of explicit and implicit bias in attitudes toward photojournalism.
Authenticating Photo Fakery: The Case of Ali Abdullah Saleh's Picture Debated on Twitter
Shortly after President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen was taken to Saudi Arabia for treatment of wound suffered in an attack by militants last week, a image began to surface on the Internet. The picture showed Saleh being treated by doctors in a hospital, but readers are now crying foul. The picture is a fake and someone has an agenda many have claimed.
Typically, verifying the authenticity of an image begins with evaluating the source. Who made the picture, where was it made, when was it made, why was it made? Even before looking at the picture for obvious signs of manipulation it is important to establish a context for the picture. Once the context -- who, where, when, why -- is establish then it is easier to validate a claim that the picture is real.
This may be changing. On Twitter, members chime in about the image and why it is a fake. Readers look at details such as lines and shadow. In addition, they look for misleading bits of information such as words or graphics. Looking at Storify's tweet stream it is easy to see the diverse range of perspectives and opinions of people who may or may not know what they are really looking.
Credit: Storify
Social media, in this way, allow people to engage in a virtual court of verisimilitude. Although many readers look at the tell-tale signs of an altered image -- sort of like a Where's Waldo puzzle -- a more important determinant is motive.
Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are like barn yards -- whoever crows loudest gets the attention. At the same time, it is important to ground such casual armchair analysis with rationality. In this case, someone had a reason for posting the picture in order to confirm or reject the winds of public perception.
Playing "god" in a digital age: The thin line between art and the subjectivity of photojournalism
Jarle recently commented on the post "Crazy light", in which I wrote: "We are constantly challenged to
make scenes that are less than interesting, more interesting." The question that this raises, however, is when and how are the conventions of honest visual reportage bent for the sake of making images more compelling?
Jarle continues:
Correct. We all strive to make our photos more interesting. But, ethically and philosophically speaking, isn't this in direct conflict with the "our pictures must always tell the truth" mantra?
There's often a thin line between photojournalism, "art" and subjective, commentary photography.
And, playing the devil's advocate, what's the difference between adding motion blur in Photoshop and using a slow shutter speed?
I'll start out by agreeing with much what Jarle has said here. From a purist perspective, "Straight" photography should be a style of photography that records what the eye witnesses without elaboration or embellishment. For the most part, this form of photography, what is photojournalism today, has remained pretty much true to form. At the same time, it is possible to find quite a few examples of photojournalism from the 1980s to the present day, that deviate from the normal conventions.
Photo Credit: Craig Aurness/National Geographic
As Jarle notes, "ethically and philosophically speaking, isn't this in direct conflict with the "our pictures must always tell the truth" mantra?"
Perhaps.
The image above (shown only partially scanned here) was made in 1987 by Craig Aurness and featured in National Geographic's 100 best pictures (2002).
According to the NPPA Code of Ethics, photojournalists should "Be accurate and comprehensive in the representation of subjects." The language here seems a bit vague. The language is vague because ultimately it is up to the photographer or his or her editor to determine what "accurate" and "comprehensive" really mean within a specific context. Is Aurness' image and honest, fair-minded and "accurate" representation according to National Press Photographers Association guidelines? In a sense, Aurness has created for the viewer an image that human eye is incapable of seeing. The human eye captures motion at 1/10th of a second, but it also has the capacity to follow a scene without disruption. The optics and mechanics of a camera far exceed the eye in this manner. Therefore, in a case like this, what constitutes a comprehensive and accurate representation?
This issue may actually be more about cultural tastes and values than it is about ethics. Cultural conventions and tastes change over time, but at the heart of any photographer/audience relationship is whether or not the image is deceptive and misleading. Digital manipulation has created a crisis of conscience for many photographers, simply because it has become so cheap, fast, and easy to embellish, construct, and correct images. So much depends on the context in which the picture is made. Motion blur in news photography has been an accepted practice for many photographers for decades. Motion emphases action and helps to make the reading of a scene more meaningful and comprehensive. Just as depth of field can add 3-dimensionality to a two-dimension image, adding motion is a "trompe le oile" or a photographer's way of tricking the eye. However, is it appropriate or ethical to create motion after the fact -- in PhotoShop? Most photographers would probably say no, it's unethical to manipulate images in order to produce an effect after the picture was captured.
Stephen Krasemann's 1985 award-winning picture of a leopard running with a recent kill was made before PhotoShop techniques came into vogue. Today, however, viewers are more sensitive to representations they perceive as manipulated or altered in some way. Whether, the general public perceives motion blur and panning as a manipulation remains to be resolved.
Analyzing the image above, can we say unequivocally that a breach of ethics has occurred? Has the context in which the event took place been manipulated by my choice to employ a slow shutter speed? Is the scene somehow more inaccurate and less comprehensive a representation give the fact that the human eye is limited by how much motion it can see at a given point in time? Should photojournalists be required to photograph scenes at 1/10th of a second or higher to ensure that they are more truthful to the human eye?
These questions, and so many others, evoke a great deal of thought and emotion. At the same time, this "thin line" between photojournalistic convention and subjective "artistic" approaches mentioned by Jarle remains unresolved, because ultimately the decision resides with what the photographer believes to be right or wrong. So much of our decision to frame, freeze and fix a moment in space and time depends not only on context, but also on our motivation for being there in the first place.
The art of deception: Pictures can lie, but people lie a lot more
Photo Credits: (missiles) Sepah News photo via Agence France-Presse/NY Times, (Powell) The Associated Press
Lying is a moral choice people make. Individuals lie. Governments lie -- some lie more than others. The truth is, lying is a fact of life.
Ethicist Sissela Bok puts it this way, "Deception and violence -- these are the two forms of deliberate assault on human beings" (Lying: Moral choice in public and private life, 1978, New York: Vintage, p. 19).
In this age of photo ops and digital photographic manipulation, the "deliberate assault" on human beings appears unremitting. Deception leads to violence against humanity. In fact, when was the last time a lie got us out of a war? This article compares two forms of deception used by individuals and government to shape public opinion – the digitally altered image and the photo op.
Who can forget one of the first major digital deceptions -- the 1992 OJ Simpson mug shot on the cover of Time magazine?
Despite the uproar caused by the darkening of Simpson's skin, the manipulation appeared an anomaly -- a fluke produced by an artist who decided to take creative license with a mug shot.
In a 2006 survey I conducted to help clarify what professionals consider to photo manipulation, I used three different definitions and asked respondents to agree or disagree.
When questioned, “I define photo digital manipulation as changes to the content of a picture after it is made through electronic means,” nearly 90 percent of respondents agree with the statement.
In a similar way, when asked, “I define photo digital manipulation as a process that changes the content of a picture by adding or removing visual elements from the original,” again, the majority agrees with the definition.
However when asked, “I define photo digital manipulation as a process that helps to make the picture better aesthetically,” responses greatly varied.
In this case, 10 percent strongly agree, while 27 percent agree. The remaining 62 percent remain either neutral on the definition or disagree with the statement. As one respondent suggests, “This is a small part of photo digital manipulation, not necessarily THE definition. I would guess this is where the amateur checks in--cleaning up redeye or other little messy details that are easily fixed in this digital world.”
At the same time, when presented the definition, “I define photo digital manipulation as a process that helps to make the objects in the picture more visually interesting,” a majority affirmed the statement.
This raises an issue of semantics, since making “the picture better aesthetically” and making “the picture more visually interesting” seem, at least to me, fairly closely related. In fact, one participant asks, “Can we define the difference 'manipulation' vs. 'image enhancement/post-processing' (tone, color, contrast, brightness, etc.).
Perhaps this is where the line begins to be drawn for many people. For decades, post-production processes have accepted the enhancement through dodging and burning, yet today event long-standing antecedent practices appear to be under the magnifying glass.
Recently, major news outlets around the world, including The New York Times, The Los Angles Times, and the Chicago Tribune, used a photograph of an Iranian missile launch. The photograph turned out to be digitally altered. Headlines accompanying the picture showing four long-range missiles coming off pads were written, true to form, to both seduce as well as edify readers.
The logic here is that if big media buys into a lie, then the public will follow. Not so, thanks to an intrepid army of bombastic bloggers ready to pounce on the slightest journalistic misstep, the truth was revealed. The Iranian government's official news agency manipulated the image. Stop the presses. Why should surprise anyone that Iran would use deception in its current high stakes game of threats against the West?
Pictures, after all, have been used to provoke conflicts for a very long time. In 1897, media baron William Randolph Hearst allegedly told his artist in Cuba, Frederick Remington, who was apparently bored with his assignment for lack of action, "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war." Even though Hearst disputed the quote, there is something prescient in the statement. History tells us that Hearst made a moral choice to provoke a conflict with Spain. After the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine, Hearst's newspaper and others fabricated stories about Spanish atrocities against civilians in Cuba and Puerto to force intervention. Hearst's moral choice to lie was motivated mostly by blind ambition. Hearst needed to build up his media empire. What better way to build a news business than by inventing a war? However, Iran's motivation to manipulate images of its defense system is purely rhetorical -- a way of flipping off the United States after all the chest thumping it has been getting from the White House. The picture is a rhetorical act because it traffics in persuasion and ideology. Lying is a mind game. In game theory, credibility and veracity are cornerstones of influencing an opponent's choices. Bloggers, anxious to make a little news of their own, called Iran's digital bluff, but the game is far from over. In fronting Iran's play, bloggers may have actually escalated tensions between the countries and forced us closer to war.
Different kinds of Deception
While digital photo manipulation is an explicit lie, there are other forms of deception that are far more insidious.
These lies, as illustrated in the photo op pictured above, are more ambiguous and at times even more deceitful. When former Secretary of State Colin Powell held up a vial containing a model of anthrax during it was to convince the world that Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction presented a clear and present danger. The vial was a prop used to signify peril and that if the U.S. failed to rid the world of Hussein we could only imagine the worse possible scenario. Powell's visual cues were supported by statements such as "My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence" and "there can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more." Although the U.N. Security Council didn't buy Powell's rhetoric, the U.S. press did. Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan notes the White House press corps were "complicit enablers" in the buildup to the war in Iraq. Much of the media at the time were eager to have "good" visuals to accompany White House rhetoric and Powell's waving of the pseudo biological weapon worked like a charm. The picture appeared on the pages of most U.S. newspapers and magazines and helped to sell the war to the American public.
While Iran's digital altered missile image was an explicit lie, Powell's pretentious viral rattling theatrics, however, was a more insidious form of deception. The moral choices made at this level are more ambiguous and implicit. Moreover, it is harder to detect the lies when they are presented as "official" news. When political strategists try to spin messages they rely heavily on educated guesses about what they can get away with selling to the American public.
The press often appear to unabashedly play by the rules of the game, and the political image-makers own the rule book. Therefore, much of what we see has been managed to provide predictable responses. Powell's visit to the U.N. was a pseudo-event far more interested in winning hearts and minds than it was about telling the truth.
Staged pseudo-events are part of our political culture and rarely called into question by the public. But there also appears to be greater tolerance for verbal shock and awe over pseudo-events that use physically altered images. Robert Warren explains Daniel Boorstin's theory of the pseudo-event as "a manufactured happening that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy through media exposure."
Stirring up public fear through the influence of government propaganda as played out in the press, be it by Iran or the U.S., continues to deliberately assault human beings around the world through deceit and violence.
Despite overly self-absorbed and obsessed with smoking guns theory bloggers are acting as change agents in this country. Bloggers challenge journalists to live up their implicit promise to “afflict the powerful and comfort the afflicted.” Moreover, bloggers are setting the tone for more engaged and visually sophisticated audiences. Bloggers are now beginning to speak truth to power by calling into question the deceptive practices committed by institutions of authority in this country.
The truth hurts: "Reality is a lie"
Photo Credit: New York Times
It was only a matter of time before an increasingly number of computer scientists began wrapped their heads around digital imaging in a big way, at least in their spare time. That's exactly what Carlo Baldassi, a student in computational neuroscience did, after looking at some pictures of his girlfriend that appeared too constrained and out of proportion. Baldassi has created an automatic photo-editing software tool that always the user to stretch an image without it looking stretched. Peter Wayner's article in The New York Times quotes Baldassi as saying, "Reality is a lie." Nice quote perhaps, but the implications are much more far-reaching as software such as the one Baldassi has made becomes commonplace.
Wayner observes:
Automated tools like Mr. Baldassi’s are changing the editing of photography by making it possible for anyone to tweak a picture, delete unwanted items or even combine the best aspects of several similar pictures into one.
The tools are giving everyone the ability of the Stalin-era propagandists, who edited the photographic record of history by deleting people who fell out of favor.
Wayner's last statement is a bit troubling. Sure, we have the tools now to seamlessly stretch the truth, but do we need to? In my on-going survey on digital manipulation more than 40 percent of respondents indicated that they could tell when a picture had been altered. 
2007-2008 snapshot of the photo manipulation survey related to whether people can tell if a picture has been altered.
2006-2007: Note that the sample sizes differ considerably.
During my time surveying people about digital photo manipulation, a fairly high percentage of people report they can tell when a picture has been altered. I find this opinion interesting, because in my own experience I am not as skillful.
In my own experience, I find myself having less time to carefully scrutinize pictures. I do assume, though, that there is an increase in altered images in the media with the introduction of digital technologies, but because of the volume of pictures flooding our consciousness, I tend, like many people, to just scan images quickly. I tend to judge the authenticity of a picture on the context and source in which it is disseminated. For example, I would tend to trust the authority of a news image in The New York Times over an advertising image any day. This means that I wouldn't typically spend time looking for manipulated images in The New York Times, while I just assume that most advertising images have been altered to varying degrees.
Getting back to Baldassi's software, which is based on the seam carving work of Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir, it makes sense that many of these tools will become commonly accepted by people over time. In the future, we will just expect that the images we see have been enhanced in some way and that the notion of objective reality is nothing more than a passing fancy.
Digital art and political consciousness in the classroom
Photo Credit: Topps Company/Collage by Matt Frederick
Former Senator George Mitchell's nearly two-year investigation into baseball's drug scandal is generating a lot of concern in the media and with the public. The 1990s, it is turning out, seems to be one of baseball's darkest eras -- greed, self-interest, and deceit.
People are responding to Mitchell's report very differently, but for students, the opportunity to find a voice through the power of digital art means the message is getting through.
Study this collage by Southern Oregon University's Digital Media Foundations student Matt Frederick. The visual metaphor resides in the progression of images illustrating Barry Bonds's presence as a public figure and role model to millions of young people.
The story begins with a normal healthy-looking Barry Bonds the Younger, moves through to the pumped-up fleshy steroid-induced era of the 1990s, and finally rests in the irony of esmaculation and destitution. In this final scene of the triptych, Bonds' face is juxtaposed onto the withered frame of a Sudanese refugee. The message comes full circle here in all its simplicity. Digital art, in all its immediacy, takes license with reality so that people will notice the complexities and ironies of their day to day existence.
As an educator working with digital media, it is important to recognize the limitless potential new technologies afford us. With very little training, students can express themselves in new and powerful ways. I believe that part of our jobs, as educators, is to allow people to experiment with these new technologies so that they can find their voice in the world. And one of the best ways to do this is to engage students in learning the skill-sets and then just stepping out of their way as quickly as possible.
Why study attitudes toward doctoring images digitally?
Can you tell if this picture was digitally altered?
In it's second year, the annual survey on digital photo manipulation seeks the participation of photojournalists and photographers, professionals and enthusiasts, from around the world to help us understand how attitudes toward digitally altered images may be changing.
Last year, more than 745 respondents participated in the annual survey on digital photo manipulation. Part of the study seeks to clarify how photographers define photo manipulation and another part explores how attitudes toward image altering my be changing over time. The study is part of a long-term evaluation of attitudes people have toward accepting digitally altered images in the media and elsewhere.
For example when asked, "I can tell when a photograph has been digitally altered," 42 percent of respondents (n=738) agreed or strongly agreed that they could tell the difference last year. However, 58 percent either disagreed or were undecided about whether they could tell a picture has been altered. Could it be possible that over time, given advances in image editing software, more people will be unable to tell. The survey encourages the participation of both professionals and amateurs photographers and explores other issues such as if it is okay for images of Hollywood celebrities to be altered but not okay for images of politicians.
In terms of defining what constitutes digital photo manipulation four questions were presented:
1) I define photo digital manipulation as changes to the content of a picture after it is made through electronic means.
2) I define photo digital manipulation as a process that helps to make the picture better aesthetically.
3) I define photo digital manipulation as a process that helps to make the objects in the picture more visually interesting.
4) I define photo digital manipulation as a process that changes the content of a picture by adding or removing visual elements from the original.
Other areas worthy of tracking over a long period of time include how photo digital manipulation is defined and whether the issue remains important in the public sphere.
More than 87 percent of respondents agreed to define photo digital manipulation as changes to the content of an image through electronic means, while 44.9 percent believed it to be process that helps to make the objects in the picture more visually interesting. When asked if photo digital manipulation helps to make the picture better aesthetically, 37. 8 percent disagreed, 23 percent had no opinion, and 38 percent showed agreement. In the last question, "I define photo digital manipulation as a process that changes the content of a picture by adding or removing visual elements from the original," more than 85 percent expressed agreement with the statement.
Although these results do not reflect any true surprises, it is important to help clarify how people define the terms they use to describe phenomena. When polled about whether participants feel photo digital manipulation is an increasingly important issue in society today, more than 85 percent agreed that it was.
(Answer: Nothing was altered on the picture above, but it sure looks like it could be. I made this picture at a home leisure booth at a county fair and there were a lot of odd things around the girl taking a nap.)
Even Extremists Use Photoshop: Osama bin Laden's makeover
Photo Credit: AP via As-Sahab
It appears that Osama bin Laden's propagandists have been taking some Photoshop lessons lately.
Typically, over the past few years, Bin Laden's screen shots have been less than aesthetically interesting or eye-catching.
Now, as the extremist continues his war of words against all-things capitalistic, especially America, there's someone cleaning up his image, complete with feathered knock-outs and dynamic new background colors. Instead of bin Laden's usual mountain gorilla look, his publicists are now busy photoshopping him to appear other-worldly and prophet-ish.
In some ways, it might be concluded that either bin Laden's stature among his followers is gaining ground, or that his political operatives are finding it increasingly necessary to elevate him through visual representations that make him appear more holy and dignified. Either way, it is curious to consider the sophistication of techniques used to sway opinion and project an increasingly mythic and metaphorical likeness of the figure over time.
Seam carving and the slippery slope of visual veracity
Technological innovative appears to be out pacing our capacity to understand and maintain some of the conventions inextricably bound to the ethics of photography, especially photojournalism.
Researchers Ariel Shamir and Shai Avidan have figured out a way of reducing and enlarging the size of images that they describe as content-aware seam carving. The process allows the Photoshop user to extend pixels in one dimension while reducing them in another, which is much different from antecedent resizing methods.
Photo Credit: Shamir & Avidan
In other words, it is now possible to resize an image while maintaining the scale of the most important features in the picture. Shamir and Avidan call the process the "judicious" reduction or expansion of pixels along along a seam. The seam carving program repeatedly carves out and inserts seams along a path of connected pixels.
Photo Credit: Shamir & Avidan
It shouldn't come as a surprise that smart people like Shamir and Avidan are coming up with new ways of changing the content of our pictures to suit tastes and aesthetics after the fact. At the same time, technological innovation give us something to think about in terms of how fast these changes are occurring.
We are increasingly moving into an era where post-production processes such as seam carving determine our ability to discern how we come to decide what is deceptive and unethical.
Newspaper promotes photo digital manipulation with readers
The Boston Globe is encouraging readers to send in Photoshopped versions of their favorvite Red Sox players for publication on its Website. Dozens of poster-type images have been e-mailed to the Globe and then posted Online. All in good fun? I guess.
The bigger issue here is that in an age of questioning the credibility and authenticity of digital images, especially in journalism, why shouldn't the newspaper think twice about promoting the practice of photo fakery?
Encouraging the public to rip-off copyright protected images from the Internet and then digitally manipulate them does very little to help people understand the importance of intellectual property rights as well as ethics in a digital age.
The Globe has been careful to make sure it covers itself though. According to a notice on the submission page, the Globe reminds readers that they must have the appropriate permission to use any of the artwork submitted and that the work is original.
By submitting your Photoshop image(s) to Boston.com, you agree that such Photoshop image(s) and the accompanying information will become the property of Boston.com and you grant Boston.com permission to publicly display and use the Photoshop image(s) in any form or media for any and all purposes. You also warrant that (i) the Photoshop image is your original work, or is properly licensed, and does not violate the copyright or any other personal or property right of any third party, and (ii) you have obtained any and all releases and permissions necessary for our use. Your submission also allows Boston.com to edit, crop or adjust the colors of the image(s) on an as needed basis.
This raises the issue of what constitutes a copyright violation when the creator is appropriating other images to construct a collage.
It's highly unlikely that the creator of this Photoshop masterpiece actually owns the rights to the faces of the ballpayers in the collage. Therefore, it appears that the newspaper must be viewing the submitted work as illustrations and not pictures composed of multiple works that are copyright protected.
All in all, the practice of encouraging readers to take material off the Web and alter it, speaks to the slippery slope we are traveling on in terms of not only the veracity of what is seen, but of how really easy it is to manipulate how we see it.
Votojournalism: Visual Spin from Stumpurbia
Techpresident.com, a blog tracking the online activities of presidential wannabees, offers a glimpse into how the social web is increasingly influencing the political process in this country.
One fascinating aspect to this site is a space dedicated to pictures using the Flickr photo-sharing site. If a picture is tagged with a candidates name, Techpresident links to it. In other words, if you are a campaign rally, all the images you upload to Flickr could have the potential to influence public perception of a candidate. It's a new twist on spin from stumpurbia.
Credit: Photo by Alex Witkowicz on Flickr
What makes this site significant is how it is using the phrase "Votojournalism" to refer to citizen photojournalism. As the site explains:
'We call it "votojournalism" because it is a prime example of voter generated content, photojournalism by the people."
According to the corporate web consultancy firm iDionome, votojournalism is “The excellent portmanteau of Voter and Photojournalism, for voter-generated content where users post pictures of the candidates on the campaign trail, online.”
Techpresident's pitch offers an alternative to the professional spin applied to typical media coverage of a candidate's life during a campaign. As the pitch reads:
"You'll find lots of candid shots here, including those of people attending campaign events, along with the presidentials in sometimes unguarded moments."
The reach of the media spotlight on candidates is now expanding exponentially with the possibilities of the Internet and the social web. Anyone with a camera phone is potentially a "votojournalist", looking to catch that one decisive "tell-all" moment that may influence a candidate's chances to become president.
Although this activity may be beneficial for democracy -- now have more "eyes" than ever before scrutinizing the political process -- we also must be careful not to fall for the redactive nature of photography. The concern here is that the torrent of images we have to deal with on a daily basis tends to reduce complex events into bytes and bits. In turn, an unvetted and relentless stream of images appears intimidating and overwhelming for many people to process. Or, in other words, our visual memory banks is in danger of running over. Votojournalism, then, is creating another visual memory stream for people to contend with in the complex history of the political process. Our visual memory of events is altered by a relentless stream of image -- images that simplify and reduce the complexities of our times to an informational/representational system that appears increasingly biased and unvetted.
At the same time, the burden of responsibility falls to the consumer to not be sucked into the potential for abuse by propagandists, spin doctors, and unscrupulous people with a flair for Photoshop. As Washington Post writer Jose Antonio Vargas reports, “For months now, there's been a disconnect between the campaign that's being waged offline and the one fought online. And the digital divide is only one part of that gulf. Political support and political fundraising don't match up on the Web either.”
This unvetted stream of "votojournalism" is not only exciting to see develop but it inevitably creates enormous challenges for its competition, the mainstream media.
In fact, we can assume the coming reality will be that a "votojournalist" or anyone on the campaign staff or close to a candidate will actually have much better access than many of their professional counterparts in the mainstream media. The level of access afforded a votojournalist, with the camera and the Internet, may actually have the advantage of scooping accredited news sources .
While many professional photojournalists find themselves penned into some highly controlled media staging area, others, particularly supporters with a ticket to $1,000-a-plate fund raiser will have free reign and access to make pictures and upload as nauseum.
The photo-op is now moving away from the high theatrics of stage management and is becoming a primary "free-for-all" conduit for pictures and video -- inevitably ending up on sites like Flickr, MySpace, or Facebook.
It follows, then, that these same images will make there way into the mainstream press under some auspicious byline called "submitted photo."
Sarkozy's spare tire: French President gets digital makeover in Paris Match
There's a great deal of concern in the media these days about the power to deceive readers through the manipulation of news images. Sherry Ricchiarrdi writes in a recent American Journalism Review article, "Thanks to Photoshop, it’s awfully easy to manipulate photographs, as a number of recent scandals make painfully clear. Misuse of the technology poses a serious threat to photojournalism’s credibility."
We tend to think of the problem as one that has mostly occurred in the U.S., but that just doesn't make sense. Media has gone global, and with it so too do all the problems of a digital age.
Recently, France has been dealing with a media scandal involving the retouching of French President Nicolas Sarkozy's picture showing him on vacation in the United States. The scandal has set off a debate about the president's close ties to the publisher of one of the country's most influential newspapers, Paris Match.
What would make a newspaper manipulate a picture like this? Can it be that the editors decided that the people of France weren't quite ready to see their new president hauling around a few extra pounds? Or, did the editors decide that it was easier to remove a little excess flab than it would be to deal with falling out of favor with the most powerful people in the country? Did the editors get a call from their owner telling them not to make Sarkozy look bad -- that there was an image to uphold and that it was important to show the president looking healthy and active?
The truth may actually be much more complicated than simply removing elements from a picture.
Like its U.S. counterparts, French media is taking a hit these days in terms of public confidence over its responsibility to reporting what they see and hear -- not what they think people want to see and hear.
Thomas Seymat, a former student from France, explains that the newspaper has been defending itself against charges of photo digital manipulation by claiming that they had done no wrong. Editors claim that the picture made the president look heavier than he actually is because of the camera angle, cast shadows, and poor printing technique.
Thomas notes:
"The thing that makes the story more scandalous is that it is not the first time that something like this has happened with this newspaper. Last year, Paris Match put in front page a photo of Cecilia Sarkozy (Not yet France's first lady) with her lover, in the street of NYC. The editor in chief of Paris Match was fired shortly after, the unofficial reason being that the owner of the newspaper is a very intimate friend of Nicolas Sarkozy. Arnaud Lagardere, a major share-holder of Paris Match, even publicly called him [Sarkozy] "my brother").... which only illustrates once again that collusion between politicians and the press is threatening its freedom and reliability."
The Paris Match controversy demonstrates once again the power of images in the construction and shaping of public perception. However, when the truth is finally discovered what we are left with is a feeling that pictures aren't the only things being manipulated here. Over all, there is a heightened public awareness of the media's power over us. The silver lining to all of this, is that with all of the scandals over digital manipulation in the press these days, people are become better consumers of information. We are learning not to trust everything we see, which may seem unfortunate on the surface. However, in the long run, understanding the relationship between what we see and what we know benefits everyone.
In a recent survey respondents were asked if "it's okay for the media to digitally alter pictures of celebrities to make them look healthier, younger, or thinner. More than 85 percent disagree or strongly disagree that it is wrong.
Even if this all seems to be a matter of common sense, the nagging reality is that the number of incidents related to digital photo manipulation doesn't seem to be on the decline. Therefore, in order to survive in a digital age, we must become more sophisticated visual communicators -- more digitally literate. We must learn to call upon the media to never violate the social contract it builds with its public, as a force outside the reach of self-interests and party politics.
The Dark Arts: Photography in the age of algorithms and the new realities of digital manipulation
Credit: Carnegie Mellon Graphics
Photography and the Dark Arts? Look out Harry Potter.
James Hays and Jexei Efros are really smart people. Hays and Efros, computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon, report they have invented a whole new way of patching up pictures by "borrowing" pieces of other pictures from the web. They call the method "scene completion", but others will differ them, especially when it comes to how the "scene" gets completed -- by taking content from other pictures off the web.
Credit: Carnegie Mellon Graphics
Scene Completion Using Millions of Photographs
By using the data base of the World Web, with millions of images to pick from, Hays and Efros, have figured out that they can splice slices of reality in a seamless process that differ from previous methods.
The interesting point here is how science, which seeks to solve a problem, often complicates and creates even more problems.
As the image engineers explain:
"Our chief insight is that while the space of images is effectively infinite, the space of semantically differentiable scenes is actually not that large. For many image completion tasks we are able to find similar scenes which contain image fragments that will convincingly complete the image. Our algorithm is entirely data-driven, requiring no annotations or labeling by the user. Unlike existing image completion methods, our algorithm can generate a diverse set of image completions and we allow users to select among them. We demonstrate the superiority of our algorithm over existing image completion approaches."
To their credit, Hays and Efros, have just moved electronic photo manipulation to a whole new level -- they have given the photo industry a bigger gun in which to pass off composites, fakes, and illustrations as wondrous illusions of reality. Not that photography hasn't been dealing with these issues since its inception. It is just that this new process contributes to already growing ways in which digital shenanigans get passed off as "truthful" representations of reality. I can see the Pentagon, politicians, advertising industry, and even more conventional mainstream news operations clamoring for the software. It's all part of the slippery slope of image production in the 21th Century.
Not only are the possibilities of digital manipulation so much greater with this process, there is also the very big question as to what will constitute copyright infringement. Even if Hays and Efros use 1/1,000,000 th of a picture made by someone else, even if they borrow a few pixels here and there without asking permission or paying the owner for that 1/1,000,000th, would they be infringing on someone's copyright? What is fair use when there's a program out scanning images on the web in order to make a whole new image?
It should not come as no great surprise that science would eventually figure out a way to semantically and seamlessly reconstruct images. We already have these processes in place.
However, the implications of this new method add fuel to the already burning argument that pictures could never be trusted as faithful reflections of reality. What you get is not what was seen, but rather only a few pixels here and there of possibly millions of other images.
Thanks to Daniel Sato for the inspiration and the link.
BLOGROLL
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