Dennis Dunleavy

Explicit and Implicit Bias: Pictures and Trust

 

 

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.

 

Related articles

Bias and Photo Manipulation: Can you tell when a picture is a fake?

Implicit Bias and Why It Matters to the Field of Political Methodology

Imperfect Cognitions on Implicit Bias

Is There Anything We Can Do to Correct for the Fact That We're All a Little Bit Prejudiced?

Proof Positive: The Symbolic Meaning behind 55,000 Images of Syrian Terror

 

Recently, torture has crept quietly onto our moral radar once again.  As peace talks begin between Syrian opposition leaders and the regime of president Bashar al-Assad, more than 55,000 images have surfaced depicting government detainees being strangled, starved to death, and horribly beaten.

Suzie Linfield, a professor at New York University, argues in a recent Op-Ed, “The photographs, which document the deaths of some 11,000 detainees, were taken not by the opposition but at the behest of Mr. Assad’s regime. Wouldn’t such a government — wouldn’t any government — want to hide its crimes rather than record them?

Well informed and written primarily from a critical/cultural perspective, Linfield’s position provides a framework for understanding how these recent images are part of a pictorial legacy of shame and moral debasement.  Historically, as she points out in her essay, images of suffering, what she calls “torture porn” are not new. In this case, the images may play an important role in the Syrian negotiations as well as in the court of public discourse.

At the same time, more, much more, a conversation considering the relationship between authoritarian regimes and the atrocities they commit, must begin with an understanding of a cultural pathology of pain, apathy, anguish and the collective unconscious. 

While observing schizophrenic patients at the Burgholzli psychiatric hospital in 1900, psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung began to develop theories to shine some light on why people act they way they do toward one another.

Jung’s concept of collective unconscious, in the case of photographs such as those made in Iraq, Sierra Leone, or Cambodia in the 1970s, may edify why people being tortured and killed constitute a type of archetypal layer within the human psyche.

In his essay, “The Structure of the Psyche”, Jung observes, “The collective unconscious … appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents.” Jung goes on to suggest how the collective unconscious can be examined in two ways, “either in mythology or in the analysis of the individual.”

For Jung, the collective unconscious is comprised of archetypal images - forms or representations manifest in dreams, fantasies, or cultural influences. Jung describes an archetype as a predisposition, which transforms a person’s consciousness through inherited symbolic thought and images. Archetypes such as the shadow, can affect ethical, moral religious and cultural behaviors.

As early as 1870, people have been using photographs to record the spectacle of the shadow archetype. The shadow or “black side” of a personality, in this case the perpetrators of abuse and torture project upon others repressed fantasies such as sexual conquest. Linfield’s use of the term “torture porn” certainly makes this connection. Susan In her book “Regarding the Pain of Others” Susan Sontag observes, “To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.”

In the 1870 hand-tinted postcard depicting the lynching of J. L. Compton and Joseph Wilson in Montana, a group of vigilantes pose dutifully for the photographer.  As a symbol of frontier justice, torture and death reveal a form of Jung’s shadow archetype. Even though the lynching picture, as well as all images depicting suffering, demonstrate a dispassionate bearing towards the human condition, the collective unconsciousness irrevocably tied or our “dark side” prevails. Today, the image surfacing from the Syrian situation is considered by many as morally and irrevocably despicable and shameful this may not have been the case in the lynching photographs made throughout the late 1800s and through the mid-1960s.

Another difference between the Syrian images and those of public lynching is symbolic consciousness. Symbols occupy the mental images of the mind and inform attitudes and beliefs. Moreover, symbols have an implicit and explicit influence on self and national identity as well as social order and organization.  The authority of pictures depicting torture and death subsume or invalidates a victim’s archetypal sense of self/being and places them in a class often dismissed by the abusers as either incomprehensible or incredulous. For example, Syrian governmental claims pronouncing how the images of brutal beatings and strangulation were digitally manipulated demonstrates both the collective conscious and unconscious state of denial and denouncement. 

Illustration: Dennis Dunleavy/Credits:TIME/via Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

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.

Journalistic ethics still matter even in a corporate media culture

Sometimes there needs to be a distinction between what people believe to be an ethical decision and a matter of taste. There are lots of disturbing images that may be distasteful to some, but not unethical to run in a newspaper or online. Cultural values and taste, not ethics, increasingly play a significant role in the decisions being made today about what picture see the light of day.

There is a tremendous amount of self-censorship going on in the news today. Many papers will not run disturbing images, not because they are afraid to tell the truth, but simply because of the push-back they get from advertisers and the public.

More than 70 percent of Americans feel they no longer can trust the news they get; and, they can't trust the pictures they see either. Reaction to this reality from editors is to be extremely cautious about running anything that might offend someone, especially advertisers.  It wasn't always this way. Editors have been pushed into a corner in terms of how decisions to run controversial images are handled. I imagine that even a "corporate suit" or lawyer may be consulted before a picture is used today.

The impact of poorly made decisions -- ethical ones --  comes down to perception. The currency of journalism has to be believability, creditability and legitimacy. Without creditability the line between what you see in the National Enquirer and what you see in the New York Times is blurred. If you can't believe what you see in the New York Times, why believe anything at all?

One really good example of ethical principle related to the positioning and placement of graphic images is how newspapers around the world handled a graphic picture of the 2004  Madrid bombing.

What I really like about this example iof ethical-decision making is how so many  newspapers came up with different choices in terms of how to display the image. In some papers you can clearly see a severed limb. Is this unethical? Who is to say what "ought to be" here? What is right and what is wrong about displaying the picture as a moment of truth. This is the reality -- 192 people were killed on the train and bodies were blown to pieces.  In other images, editors decided to make radical crops to avoid showing the limb. The editors were probably using the old "breakfast test" here -- a logic that believes that nothing put the front page should make people lose their breakfast over. Is the crop unethical in the sense that they are hiding the bloody truth from readers?

We could look at this from any number of ethical perspectives, including what's in the best interest of the public, what is in the best interest of the advertisers, what is in the best interest of the publishers, or what is in the best interest of the victims of the bombing.  Where do our loyalties lie in running such a disturbing image? What are the consequences of running it? Is it right or wrong to run such a picture? Clearly, all these editors had differing opinions on this issue and we can see them for ourselves here.  

In others cases, editors chose have the image altered or deleted from the frame. To falsify an image by removing an element is, by all photojournalistic standards, unethical. It is unethical because it is a deception. The strange thing about this type of logic is that even though the paper is lying to its readers, it still expects to be believed as a creditable source of information. The editors might argue how the bloody limb does not really contribute all that much to the story, or they might say they were afraid to offend readers. Even if the limb was not deleted from the scene, some editor opted to darken the limb in order to make it blend in with the background. With headlines reading "Massacre" and "Platform of Death," this type of manipulation makes the display almost ironic. Is toning an image to make it more acceptable unethical? Some editors would say it is. In 2003,  Patrick Schneider  of the Charlotte Observer was fired over manipulating the color in some of his award-winning pictures. It appears, then, that tolerance for any type of manipulation has become more rigid in this digital age.

Are there any clear guidelines for editors in these situations? How should newspapers and Web sites deal with graphic images -- images that might offend viewers?  Making ethical decisions in journalism is a critical responsibility of the press. The public deserves a press that is consistently honest and ethically principled. Having an on-call citizenship committee of peers and the public to help editors decide what people might perceive as right or wrong about using a disturbing image is a good idea. Some publications do have such committees to call upon.  Further, communicating with the public about the ethics of using such images is also an important issue. Journalists need to educate the public about their responsibilities as eye-witnesses to acts of great compassion as well as acts of terrible injustice. Today, much of the corporate/consolidated media, however, avoids such accountability when. Therefore, it is no wonder the public has lost confidence in the press when it comes down to making decisions that require insight, empathy, and ethical reasoning.

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 obliterators: How the media sanitizes our news

The media, it has been said, may not tell us what to think, but it does tell us how to think about things. When the media frames a story in a particular way it also helps to shape our perceptions about an event or an issue. The recent assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan is no exception. Now we are learning that some media crossed the line when major networks digitally blurred the background on images showing the devastation surrounding the assassination.

Obliterating reality and censoring the truth is probably the most damaging thing the mainstream media can do to itself. It is interesting, that in a culture of violent movies and video games, the  gatekeepers at the major networks felt compelled to clean up and sanitize the message before sending it out to the public. Was the self-censorship caused by a concern over offending our sensibilities or was it because the networks didn't want to rankle their corporate sponsors and possibly see a dip in their ratings? In this instance, the media is no better than any other instrument of censorship. Mano Singham observes:

Propaganda is far more effective when there is no overt control or censorship of journalists but where they can be persuaded to self-censor, because then everyone, reporters and reading public alike, think that what they are getting is 'objective' news and are thus more likely to believe it. Implementing such a sophisticated propaganda model requires some overt pressure initially, but reporters and editors quickly learn what they can and cannot say if they want to advance their careers.

It is far easily to leave all this mess behind and retreat into the chaos of our own lives, but images speak to us, especially those that are powerful enough to rock us out of the deep sleep of our day-to-day worlds.

Wonkette, the popular political buzz blog, got it right in writing about the assassination photos:

I think we see a hell of a lot of graphic fake violence at the movies, in video games and on the news and we know that it’s not real and there’s so much of it that it has lost its power to offend. But, when it comes to real violence to real people, we all turn away and thus make it less real than the fake violence. These are pictures of real violence, and of the horrible things people all over the world will do to one another, and it isn’t conveyed by seeing the reaction of another person. This look of this man’s pain, and shock, and horror doesn’t do justice to the carnage at his feet, even as real as that pain on his face is.

Emotional images such as those made in Pakistan should make us stop, drop, and roll, as if we were on fire. However, when exposed to such pictures from around the world, especially given the feeling that the media is holding back the reality from us, all we are left is a sense of  powerlessness, disdain, and apathy.

The pictures showing graphic violence and the extermination of human life should lead us to action.  But what action can we take to make sense of the senseless bloodshed in the world? Should we take to the streets, march on Washington, gather in communities to discuss alternatives, or come together in other acts of non-violent protest? Will our elected representatives really listen to our concerns?

Pictures, have throughout history, helped to move humanity into action. The dead at Gettysburg,  the squaller of 19th century tenement life, child labor, and the dust bowl, are all example of pictures that help to raise awareness about issues.

Today, unfortunately, I am not confident this holds true. How many pictures of starving African babies do we need to see before we feel pressed into action to stop the madness? Now we are presented an image, one that is being sanitized for our protection, of a man crying out in grief and shock in the middle of a sea of blood and bodies. Will this picture soften our hearts and make us work for peace in the world.  Inevitably, some people that truly feel the pain of this man and his country enough to take action, but what of the majority? 

I return to the image of the distraught man repeatedly not out of repulsion or morbid interest, but out of fear. I fear that the day will come, or has already come if you think about 9/11 or incidents of school violence, that I too could be this man. That this man is already inside me.

The reality of the media sanitizing our news should be another wakeup call -- we should care -- we must care -- about the images we see. We must recognize that these images form a  constellation of points on our horizons -- they create for us the conditions of knowing we need in order to make decisions about our lives and the world in which we live.

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.)

Is photography losing its grip on reality?

Whoa... Newsweek's Peter Plagens is beating the photography is dead drum. Plagens' article titled "Is photography dead?"  takes the same tone we've been hearing about with photojournalism. Photoshop makes realism anachronistic.  Photography, the argument goes, has lost its way in the world -- "It's hard to say "gee whiz" anymore," Plagen notes.

"Art and truth used to be fast friends. Until the beginning of modernism, the most admired quality in Western art was mimesis—objects in painting and sculpture closely resembling things in real life."

Plagen's  argument seems warranted because of photography's relationship to the apparent "real" in front of the lens. Now, with digital processes, what's set before the lens, as we are quickly discovering, is not always real at all. Nevertheless, to raise the question of photography's death is a bit of an academic cul de sac. Going in, doesn't mean you'll get very far.

Photo Digital Manipulation End of the Year Survey

Since August of 2006, I have been collecting responses from readers concerning attitudes toward photo digital manipulation.

In order to sample changing attitudes over time, I am relaunching the survey and will begin to compare results. Anyone can take the survey and all participation is voluntary, confidential, and anonymous. For instance, a respondent's IP address is not stored in the survey results, which protects the identity of the individual to some extent.

The intention of the survey is to understand the way people think about digital manipulation over time. In 2006, more than 735 people weighed in on the issue. One of the questions I would like to track is whether or not people can tell if a picture has been manipulated. Many people believed they could. Is that claim still true a year later? Let's find out.

Click Here to take survey

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.

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.

Photo Fibs

Rob Pegoraro, a Washington Post technology columnist, has some words to say about how innovations in digital photography is making it increasingly easier to make pictures that look better than reality.

The author contends that some of the new digital cameras on the market today can automatically correct problems that used to take more time and more skill to accomplish. Basically, modern cameras have digital deception built into them.

We now have available to us automatic "portrait enhancers", "slimming modes," and "red-eye reducers." For Pegoraro, "This kind of photo fakery ..... also fits in with the overall evolution of digital cameras."

From a sociological perspective, contemporary culture -- one that seeks out  ideal notions of beauty, compulsive perfectionism and an appetite for self-indulgence -- has created a demand for such feel-good contrivances. We are now capable of creating new likenesses that differ from reality. We can create and maintain resemblances that might makes us appear slimmer and younger may improve how we feel about ourselves, but in reality it's all about the smoke and mirrors of digital bits and bytes.

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.

Annual survey on photo manipulation: When to draw the line on digitally altered images

As our visual culture becomes accustomed to digital photography, are people becoming more apathetic about the digital alteration of pictures in the media? Will people come to expect that most of the pictures they view in the media today have been electronically enhanced in some way? If so, how will this acceptance, impact journalism and photography as a source of information and reportage?

Last year, I surveyed photographers about their attitudes and perceptions concerning the digital manipulation of photographs, especially within the context of news reportage. This year, I would like to continue to ask respondents about the alternation of images with a brand new survey. However, the questions in this survey are far broader with the hope of collecting responses from a wider audience. Just how serious are people about photo digital manipulation?

Click Here to take the survey

What I discovered last year was that only about half of the more than 480 respondents believed they could detect a picture when it was digitally altered. Only 6 percent strongly agreed with the statement, "I can tell when a photograph has been altered."  At the same time,  85 percent of the respondent agreed that they had seen a digitally manipulated picture in the media within the last five years.

This year's annual survey is different in that it seeks to understand how people define photo digital manipulation. The survey also explores how significant digital manipulation is as an issue in society. Further, at the bottom of each question is an area for comments, which is something last year's survey lacked.  Broad participation in this survey is encouraged as it is not only designed for professionals, but for enthusiasts as well.

Making Connections with Pictures: Are traumatic events embedded in the collective conscious?

An abandoned boy sniffs glue near the central cathedral in San Salvador, El Salvador (1993).

Pictures help make sense of the past while we live in the present.

When we recall an image that conveys meaning for us, the picture will often hold a certain power over how we think and act in the world. In other words, pictures help shape or construct what we know of as reality.

It has been argued that memory is actually a form of energy. Asha Clinton (2006) in a journal article concerning transpersonal psychotherapy   suggests "The memories, cognitions, emotions, sensations, and intuitions human beings experience are themselves composed of energy."

Many of this nation's iconic imagery, from the 20th century at least, such as the flag raising on Iwo Jima, Nick Ut's picture of a young girl fleeing the bombing of her village in Vietnam, or the shooting of college students at Kent State University by National Guard troops, are images that signify traumatic events in society. These are pictures in which symbolic meaning extends beyond the actual occurrence.  If we consider the number of prizes given to pictures displaying trauma and conflict each year in professional photojournalism competitions, we may begin to realize just how insatiable our appetite is for the sensational. This is not a criticism of the value of providing people with quality on-the-spot reportage of significant events. Instead, the point here is that our culture has become numb to the suffering these images represent. In our collective conscious every image we see in today's press is compared with other images representing similar events -- war, famine, natural disasters. We are a culture continuously awash in images of violence and devastation.   

Recalling such images may rekindle for some negative feelings, while for others, pictures may hold little or no significance. Do pictures influence how we interpret and remember our world from one generation to the next?

Pictures can evoke difficult emotions and give rise to negative beliefs and fantasies. Pictures can also bring about healing. Pictures can rebuke or challenge prevailing negative attitudes as well as reinforce them. 

In this way, the power of the image is undeniable. We live with our past, because we are constantly reminded of it  through the images we care to remember.

Blurring the lines: What's real?

Mike Musgrove in the Washington Post has a good take on the continuing debate about all those darn "fake" photos out there these days.

The writer lists some of the high-tech features available today in cameras such as,  "red-eye" reduction and the elimination of facial blemishes and pounds. Of course, there are even more features to come,  all of which will enhance our experiences, fix and frame reality for us,  and make the world a better place for our children.

Musgrove contends, "Digitally enhanced photos are starting to bump up against the real world. A few news photographers have lost their jobs for digitally tinkering with their shots, but there's weirder stuff afoot as well."

Without beating a dead pixel here, it's worthwhile considering the larger societal implications of a culture that will actually have to face up to the fact that photography has never been an objective process. Today, digital technology is forcing us to realize that we've been in denial about the process of making pictures since its inception. 

We like to think that what we are seeing in a picture is real. Sure, a picture is real, but it also a social construction --  a contrivance of will, an act of authority, a whim, muse, or something that tickles our fancy.   This is what's  real about photography. When we freeze, fix, and frame a moment in time and space we are essentially excluding a million other moments that are equally as real. A picture is real only in the sense that it represents a fragment of reality. If we alter a fragment of the real in some way during or after a picture is made how much are we altering reality? 

This is a particularly sticky problem for some of us when we begin to realize how the whole logic surrounding the notion of reality or what is real is flawed.

Pictures serve personal and public needs, and by doing so they exist contently within the realm of subjectivity.

Science and technology makes it possible to re-render reality in and out of the camera -- correct the objectionable -- make the imperfect, perfect.

Ultimately, what this really means is that in an imperfect world, digital technology makes it possible for life to appear picture perfect.

Ethics and Public Faith in Journalism Takes a Hit, Again

At a time when public confidence in journalism continues to slip, questionable professional practices or lapses in personal judgment are having as much an impact on the industry as they have on a given individual.

Last month, when, Toledo Blade photographer Allan Detrich digitally altered an image to make it less distracting, his actions, whether intentional or accidental, provide yet even more fuel to the fire of public distrust. Apparently, Detrich's  creative license may prove to extend beyond this one incident.

We now have reached a point in our society when, at times, the media seems determined to abdicate a portion of its commitment to the truth, for expediency.

As a representative of an industry already under intense public scrutiny, Detrich, who recently resigned from the newspaper, now joins a growing list of photojournalists, such as Charlotte Observer photographer Patrick Schneider, Lebanese freelancer Adnan Hajj, and Los Angeles Times photographer Brian Walski, who have succumbed in recent years to the temptations of digital technology. 

The big question these incidents raise is simple: Why do some photographers feel compelled to manipulate images, while others live with what they get? Getting to the answer, however, is far more complex and may reside actually in a culture, which excels in competition and individualism.

People do not like being lied to. Digital manipulation, the addition or subtraction of contributing or distracting elements in a frame, is a type of fraud and lying.

Jonathan Wallace observes, “The reason that I hate lies is because, like you, I wish to navigate carefully through life, and to do so I must be able to calculate my true position. When you lie to me, you know your position but you have given me false data which obscures mine.”

Journalists have always been moral agents of culture and societal tastes. News content falls within an informational/representational system that changes over time. Journalism has its good times and its bad times throughout history. Within this informational/representational system, however, truth has always remained a core journalistic virtue. Journalists must struggle to obtain and maintain truth in reportage because every situation they encounter is slightly different – always presenting differing degrees of moral complexity. 

The act of altering an image to correct a deficiency may seem innocent enough on the surface, but deeper down the shift from fact to fiction signifies a moral choice that is informed by either ignorance or duplicity.   Regardless of motive or rationale, Detrich’s case should remind us that journalists function to serve the public good through a series of professional and societal expectations and obligations that are imposed upon them.

In this digital age, these expectations and obligations become intensified to the point, where opportunities to make things look better or to get the better of the competition are just too easy.

Ultimately, it seems not to matter how rigorous and vigilant the media is in detecting and ousting those who lie through their photography and reporting. The damage is done -- public faith, once again, is lost. 

The emotional war within: Listening to pictures of pain and suffering

How much of what we know about the human costs of war do we let in to impact us in profound ways?

Although there are remarkable and powerful images of war to remind us of the unthinkable horrors human beings continue to suffer, it appears that for the most part we rarely truly learn from them.

Although we appear fascinated by the sacrifice people endure for a cause, noble or ignoble, most of  the pictures that remind us of those sacrifices seem all about ignored.

The pictures we see of dead and wounded civilians and soliders in times of conflict become social artifacts that may or may not stir our emotions or move us to action.

In recent times, we have seen how Joe Rosenthal's picture of a band of Marines raising a flag on a tiny island in the Pacific could mobilize millions of Americans in the war effort during WWII.

Photo Credit: Joseph Rosenthal/World Wide Photos/AP

 

Later, we have seen how another  image could have just the opposite affect, as Nick Ut's picture of a young girl running naked down a road after she was burned in an aerial attack on her village by the South Vietnamese Air Force, with U.S. support.

 

Photo Credit: Nick Ut/AP

 

Images such as those by Rosenthal and Ut remain embedded in our collective consciousness because of how often they are repeated and recollected in our visual culture. When we speak of patriotism and sacrifice, or, of so-called the "good war", the Iwo Jima flag raising image seems to always come to the forefront of our common discourse. When we speak of atrocities and failed U.S. foreign policy, so too, do we find referencing the incident at Trang Bang, Vietnam, where a little girl and nations were changed forever. 

Recently, a photographer in Southern Illinois has made an image, or a series of images, that should become emblematic of what critics are beginning to call the current quagmire in Iraq. 

  Photo Credit: Nina Berman/Redux

The picture by Nina Berman of Redux, is a wedding portrait of a Marine who had been burned over much of his body. Although badly disfigured from a bomb blast in Iraq, his facial features all but melted away to bone, Ty Ziegel lives to tell his story to the world.

The picture, as simple as a picture can be, makes us want to listen. The picture makes us cry out in empathy, muster hope in the presence of such incredible human spirit and strength, or simply cringe in disgust. In the end, however, it is the couples resolve that makes us want to listen.

In a recent article in Salon.com, photographer Berman suggests, "What makes pictures interesting is that they provide the space for the viewers to contemplate."

Contemplation is a form of listening to our innermost feelings about the things we see.  Contemplation, if given  space,  moves us to act on our feelings. To contemplate the explicit and implicit meaning of Berman's image means to imagine our own lives transformed by war as Ty Ziegel's life has been.

Thomas  Merton, the Trappist monk and writer, once observed that  "True contemplation is inseparable from life and from the dynamism of life--which includes work, creation, production, fruitfulness, and above all love. "

Merton continues:

"Contemplation is not to be thought of as a separate department of life, cut off from all man's other interests and superseding them. It is the very fullness of a fully integrated life. It is the crown of life and all life's activities."

Berman's wedding portrait has received acclaim in photojournalism. In fact, it won top honors in the portrait category of the World Press Photo competition this year. But it is not the picture, as an object or artifact, that should be admired and remembered. What should be contemplated here, first and foremost, is that the judges recognize the saliency and value of the content within the frame.  The space Berman speaks of here moves beyond the rancor of congressional debates and presidential pomposity. The space Berman speaks of  gets to the core of some of the most essential qualities of being human -- love, loyalty, hope, and reconciliation.   Can a picture evoke the "big" ideas expressed here? Apparently so.

How will history remember Ty Ziegel's wedding picture? How could this   unassuming portrait of a wedding couple become the next Iwo Jima or Trang Bang in the collective memory of wars past and present?

What distinguishes the pictures is less a matter of aesthetics and more a more of politics. For the Iwo Jima picture the U.S. government adopted the image as mass marketed it as the embodiment of the "good war." In the case of the Trang Bang picture, the anti-war movement of the 1970s embraced  symbolism of the moment as proof of the so-called "dirty little war."

Pictures, in iconic terms, extend beyond the meaning of occurrences in several ways. Iconic pictures, such as the hooded prisoner of Abu Ghraib, signify ideological bench marks in history -- turning points -- in the cultural  memory of  American society.

It is only through the assimilation of an ideological benchmark image into our visual culture as a form of a larger societal discourse that an iconic permanance can emerge. Although the Berman image has been seen now by ten of thousands of web-watchers, it will not be until we see the picture on billboards, war posters, and TV screens that its status as an iconic image will endure as a product of social consciousness. 

Digital culture reveals seedier side of visual behavior

News about how photography is becoming increasingly diverse in our digital universe in all over the Internet these days. Stories about how our visual culture may be changing how people act in front of and behind the lens of a camera. However, human nature and needs based on fears and desires, remain the same. 

People remain obsessed with making and sharing images with each other, but now there is the Internet and digital technologies to make it all that much easier.

This week alone, on the seedier side of life, there are stories about how Scottish troops made mobile phone pictures of each other allegedly taking drugs while on duty, nude photos of actress Jennifer Aniston appearing on the web before the release of her latest movie, a teen prosecuted for taking naughty photos of herself and her teenage beau and e-mailing, the arrest of an Australian man for taking dozen of digital photos up women's skirts, a host of embarrassing and personal photos of a young woman in a dressing room mysteriously appearing online after being dropped off for processing at Wal-Mart.

We hear a lot about how digital photography is helping people become more productive and creative in recording their daily lives, but what we don’t often understand is how the darker side of human behavior is also coming out.  We know that citizen journalism is now joining forces with mainstream media, camera phones are being banned from public places, and new laws are prohibiting pictures such as those from Ana Nicole Smith’s autopsy from ever being published.   

Are digital cameras enabling deviant behavior more now than in the past with film cameras?

The intelligent observer

How much of what we see do we really understand or even try to make sense of?

The answer to this question lies in developing the skill of intelligent observation.

Artist and philospher Frederick Franck noted, "We have become addicted to merely looking at things and beings. The more we regress from seeing to looking at the world—through the ever-more-perfected machinery of viewfinders, TV tubes, VCRs, microscopes, stereoscopes—the less we see, the more numbed we become to the joy and the pain of being alive, and the further estranged we become from ourselves and all others.”

The art of observation begins with immersing ourselves in the textures and tones of life. Observation requires us to immerse ourselves in looking and listening without passing judgment on the impressions we collect.

Observation as part of the communicative process is about acknowledging the value of relationships between things that will provide a context for the experiences we have. Sense of place refers to making connections to the impressions we collect. Journalists are not mechanics fixing broken parts. Rather, journalists are storytellers communicating about what it is like to be in the world.

It is through details and context and a sense of place that photojournalists can create images of impact.

Human beings are dependent upon the senses for the impressions we hold of the world around us. We rely on our senses for survival – sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. However, as we develop and refine our craft, there is a tendency to favor one sense over another.

The key to becoming stronger storytellers, through words and images, is to work with all our senses to remember the impressions we experience and collect. As photojournalist we must learn to observe without judging, without letting thought intrude between you and the object. When you see a sunset or a landscape and say, “How beautiful,” you are not immersed in it, and will notice only part of what you might otherwise have seen.

In order to communicate messages effectively or express ourselves fully we have to think about what it means to be an observer. However, we must aknowledge the paradox in the acts of seeing and being seen. In our increasingly visual culture, we are both the observer and observed, the seer and the seen. What could this possibly mean? Are there any consequences implied in the act of observing or of being observed?

Dictionaries offer various meanings for the word “observation” including:

To perceive or notice
To watch attentively
To make a systematic or scientific observation
To watch or be present without participating actively.

Howerver, the observational skills we used in photojournalism suggest the active engagement of all our sensing powers.

The world is a sensual place: we see, hear, feel, smell and taste so that on a number of sensory levels we engage ourselves. Think of the moment you woke up this morning. What were the things you felt, sensed, perceived, and eventually responded? Was it the light coming through a window, the sound of traffic on the street, or the smell of coffee in the air?

Most of the time, I walk through my days unaware of all that is going on around me, out of touch with how I am being affected by what I sense. When I finally slow down to really take in space, sounds, sights, smells, texture and tone, my experiences with that space change. I feel more fully engaged. Observation teaches us to be this way in the world and to have empathy for the things we see and photograph.

There is a clear distinction between looking at something, seeing and observing. Observation is about allowing yourself to become sensitized to the things you are seeing. In other words, observation is about sensitive seeing.

As photographers we are drawn to light and the shape of things. We compose images as we think they might be in our heads and then with our cameras. How many times have we looked at our images and said to ourselves that is not what I saw, that is not what I felt? Becoming a sensitized observer means more than passive seeing––it means entering into a relationship and engagement with the things we see. Observation is experiencing what we see and translating that experience through the words and images that come to us.

How many images of war, famine, natural disaster, poverty, or any other extreme of the human condition have we seen in our lifetimes? I am thinking now of Kevin Carter’s image from Africa of a starving infant with a vulture nearby waiting for death to come.

How many other images like this one have I seen but not been moved or touched by in some way?

Our newspapers, television screens, websites, magazines and books are flooded with such icons of depravity and horror. Observation is part of a process of perception which engages all of your senses, sound, smell, taste, touch, and sight. When you acquire the skills of an observer you will also learn the value of waiting and anticipation. This is important to remember because there are no easy ways to learn how to be careful observers of the world around us. There is no mathematical formula, master plan, blue print or recipe for learning how to see and experience the things we choose to see.

Observation begins with both subconscious and conscious states of begin. We enter a space, connect with, pay attention to, and open ourselves to the hidden dramas of life that otherwise we let slip past us.

In the chaos and confusion of life we are trained from an early age on to focus almost entirely on the outcome of our efforts. No pain no gain. Life in our advanced capitalist consumer-centric society is measured in outcomes: material possessions, wealth, class, status, highest level of education attained, etc. With so much emphasis on producing outcomes in our art or in our daily life we have lost the ability to clearly discern the quality of incomes. We might refer to “incomes” as all those subtle and understated attributes which contribute to the outcomes we produce.

Observation helps us to explore and evaluate the things we are drawn to. As photographers we are moved by an array of ways of knowing the world and experiencing it. We place ourselves in the path of the present to make sense of the path and to glimpse the future. We become aware of space and time in an attempt to capture it, fix it, brand it, and preserve it. This is what an image does––it holds time and space in an illusionary dimension of the two as if it were somehow real. Beneath the surface of this temporal spatial relationship a continuum emerges through our memory of the likeness we view before us.
Observation is a skill we must develop if we want to engage in the world beyond the mere looking at it through a lens.

The images we create of our reality arise through observation and contemplation. Many, many times we fail to capture what we believe to be the essence, understanding, or truth of what we observe through photography on the first attempt. Perhaps this is because what we looking at first, what we glimpse is only a suggestion of something deeper, more profound and more meaningful.

As Franck reminds us there is always “the glaring contrast between seeing and looking-at the world around us is immense; it is fateful. Everything in our society seems to conspire against our inborn human gift of seeing."

Ultimately, learning to observe people, places, and activities in the world can make us better storytellers, communicators, writers and photographers.

The technological malaise

Technological innovation has always played a significant role in the history of photography. With innovations in digital technology––cameras, computers, image editing software and telephony––photographic routines in photojournalism are being driven by a relentless push toward faster, cheaper and greater quantities of information.

Digital technology increasingly intensifies and fundamentally changes the way people think, feel and act toward making images. Albeit an overly deterministic and simplistic comment, the consequences of shifting from film-based to digital photography are only just now emerging. It seems fairly obvious to me that there is a strong relationship between how productive and how empowered a photographer feels using a digital camera. However, do these facets of routine necessarily change the nature of photography?

Perhaps not in the way we think.

As many observers have argued, it has been suggested that the camera, be it film or digital, is a tool for communicating information and ideas between a source and a user. The camera is an extension of the seer and the seen. People tend to act predictably in front of and behind the camera, but the immediacy of the digital format is what alters the experience from prior experiences with film.

The speed in which communication takes place in a digital age does have the potential to impact the encounter significantly. Moreover, it is not only the camera that is changing the landscape of how we capture and exchange “moments” and “memories.” Along with the camera, the user must how become familiar with other technologies, including computers, software programs, and electronic storage, and telephony, especially cellular technology.

All of this complicates how we talk about digital photography, because it’s not just about taking pictures anymore. It is about how we take, select, size, store, and share the images with one another on printed page or computer screen. It is about how we decide to interact with one another when making pictures with a digital camera. It is about the science as well as the moral agency of making pictures in a digital age.

In a recent survey of professional photojournalists 75 percent of respondents claimed that they not received training in the use of the digital camera. In fact, most of the knowledge photojournalists have about digital technology comes from word of mouth or the Internet.

Even higher education has been hard pressed to keep up with these transitions. For Jon Jeffery, “New technologies have recently changed the universal body of knowledge that defines the foundation for teaching in professional photographic education.”

In the classroom, the changes in what students are required to know about photography is not just about making technically clean, well composed and meaningful images. The days of standing under the amber and red safelights in a darkroom watching prints develop are ending. Now, students must understand the techno-speak of computer geeks and photo gear heads.

Students now often face the harsh reality of technological malaise with concerns over increased image contrast, dot gain, editing and storage. In an all-digital environment, photogrpahy is no longer as mysterious, magical, or even as sexy and hanging out in a darkroom making a perfect print. Digital technology makes the process of producing images for publication more clinical and less quaint.

When we think about what photographers have to do now in order to make a publication deadline compared to what we did only 15 years ago, it is easy to understand the discontent and sense of frustration expressed by some professionals.

As Grazia Neri contends, “Reflection is necessary also on the subject of the new technologies: photograph scanning, digital transmission, the Internet. Many photographers consider the advent of digital technology a collective misfortune, which it is not possible to escape. The digital world is here to stay. It is a world that can be improved.”

Beauty, Self-Esteem, and Photoshop, Oh My....

The frames above are part of an interesting time lapse video produced for the Campaign for Real Beauty, which show the evolution of a model from makeup to Photoshop. Anyone ever questioning how advertising constructs an unrealistic ideal for what beauty is should look like needs to see this video. Dove soap is currently underwriting a self-esteem campaign for women and the video is part of the effort. Hats off to Dove.

Tortured realities: The camera phone comes of age

The potential of the camera phone image to speak truth to power cannot be underestimated. As James Fallows observes, "History is driven by ideas and passions, and by unforeseeable events....History is also driven by science and technology."

When technology slams headlong into inhumane and unjustice acts, people begin to take notice. Today, we are on the verge of a digital revolution with the emergence of cell phone technologies -- one that can be seen as a positive force used to promote democracy or one that may eventually be used to destroy it.

Pictures from Abu Ghraib of U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners,the  tsunami disaster, the subway bombings in London, the execution of Saddam Hussein, the massacre of Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines  in Haditha, and more recently the photographs of Egyptian police torturing suspects suggests the emergence of a hyper-mediated surveillance society.

The motivation to photograph atrocities by the perpetrators, such as in Abu Ghraib prison, Haditha, and in Egypt indicates how people in positions of power and control blindly operate by a code of conduct that is beyond any law -- human or devine. The soldiers and police making these images possess a sense superiority and impunity toward those they deem to be the enemy.  The  pictures they make may be made as evidence, entertain, or propaganda.

When 21-year-old Egytian minibus driver Imad Kabir was hung upside down and sodomized, his torturers recorded the proceedings with a camera phone and then transmitted the video to the Kabir's co- workers as a warning. The pictures eventually made their way onto the Internet and two police offers were jailed in the incident.

Originally conceived as an act of oppression against those opposing the government's authority, the Egyptian camera phone images reveal the often rumored and insidious truth about the mistreatment of prisoners. It is extremely difficult for any government to deny such cases of abuse when the evidence appears so indisputable.

The camera phone images we have seen in recent years are glimpses of a world we have heard about but have seldom seen.  Images of atrocity and abuse, revealing the darkest side of humanity, speak truth to power as history unfolds before our eyes.

Photojournalism's Lamest Moments 2006

[click on the image to see an enlarged view of the timeline] or Download lamest.pdf  

From the deaths of legends Gordon Parks, Arnold Newman and Joe Rosethal to the scandal surrounding digitally altered and set up pictures in the Lebanonese conflict, it's been an interesting year for photojournalism.

I've been taking a look at some of the more unsettling trends in the industry and have come up with list I call the Lamest Moments.  The categories are limited and very unscientific of course. The big winner, or loser, depending on your perspective, was in my opinion, Reuters not only for the digital manipulation debacle this summer, but also for its latest scheme in trying to attract citizen shutterbugs to contribute pictures to the wire services. Much attention was given to the events of June when a Reuters' photographer sent manipulated pictures of the conflict in Lebanon. Reuters' editors, for their part, dropped the ball by not using common sense and vigilance over what got put up on the wire. The fall out from all this continues to be the increased distrust of mediate visual images.

In the end, photojournalism also took some serious hits in terms of credibility this year from using pictures of the “Green Helmet” guy, which was alledgedly a Hezabollah insider. Bloggers started connecting the dots when pictures of the “Green Helmet” guy was shown at multiple scenes carrying the same body of a dead child and directing photojournalists to make images.

In the "Under reported visual reportage" category, much of the mainstream media missed or played down the release of hundreds of more abuse pictures from Abu Ghraib. Perhaps the images were too graphic for audiences or that since this was just a "follow up" on the pictures originally released in 2003, editors decided that enough was enough.

The New York Post, true to form, gets the "Lamest Headline and Caption" award with its layout showing the bloodied face of Iraqi insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The use of a text call-out to put the words "Warm up the virgins" in Zarqawi does little to ease tensions between the Islamic and Western worlds.

Newsweek magazine walked away the the "Lamest Cover" award by violatiing of every known principle of design, not to mention common sense. Newsweek out did itself with this collage of representative Mark Foley’s fall from grace.

Finally, in the "Lamest Use of Digital Technology" category, a picture claiming to be the world's largest digital image (8.6 gb) tests the boundaries of "so what". Although a  highly debateable, I still think that making an 8.6 gigabyte image using multiple smaller pictures was a bit misleading in claiming to be the world’s largets digital picture. In the end, the PR this picture generated seemed more like a stunt than an actual technological achievement.

The demise of photojournalism is not all about the threat from citizen journalism

There has been so much discussion about the demise of photojournalism related to the growth of citizen journalism recently –  a discussion centered around the idea that just about anyone with a camera phone or digital camera can be published. Citizen shutterbugs cannot replace photojournalists entirely, but this newly created stream of images does present a few challenges to the profession. Chief among the problems with a citizen-centered influx of images for news publication is the question of credibility and authenticity. Editors seem to be having their hands full these days just making sure their own professionals are playing by the rules without the burden of checking on the veracity of Uncle Jim Bo’s pictures from the county fair.  Having acknowledged this argument as simplistic and reductive, more attention must be paid to other more systemic issues facing news operations in general, and photojournalism specifically.

If photojournalism is truly dying the slow death so many seem to be predicting then we must look at the economics of an entrenched media industry that is finding it hard to adapt and cope in a faster, leaner digital world.

In an effort to clarify some of the issues facing photojournalism today it may be helpful to construct a list of the top ten influences on the field in the past 20 years. As a disclaimer, as well as an advanced apology to those who know better, making any sort of list is problematic. Here  are some of the major influences affecting photojournalists worthwhile considering.  Some of these influences are more obvious than others.

1.    Media consumption habits and a decreased demand for full-time photojournalists at the daily newspaper.
2.    Media Consolidation
3.    Digital Photography
4.    Electronic photo manipulation
5.    Wireless Internet
6.    Citizen Journalism
7.    Broadband Internet Access
8.    Mini-digital video
9.    Picture Editing

Media Consumption

First to be considered in terms of influences are changes in the ways people consume media. With a decline in daily newspapers fewer photojournalists will be needed. This does not mean that photojournalism is dead, but it does mean few traditional job opportunities for competent individuals. Traditionally, newspapers have hired the greatest number of photojournalists, but of this number (between 6,000 - 10,000 newspaper photographers in the late 1990s), nearly 40 percent, were freelancers.

The decline of the U.S. daily newspaper during the period 1986 – 2006 illustrates a shift away from reading daily newspapers to the use of multiple sources such as the Internet, cable, broadcast, and radio. Even though there are far more media channels available to consumers than there were 20 years, the number of photojournalists entering the field far outnumbers the opportunities.

Digital Photography

Digital photography is has had an enormous impact of the field of photojournalism. Photojournalists are as productive, resourceful, and creative as ever but digital photography has intensified the process, especially in the area post-production. Photojournalists are now expected to know more and work harder on deadline than ever before. Many photojournalists are their own lab techs and editors now. They stay later on assignments, work from remote locations longer and more often, and are expected to turn around images in an instance. These pressures have transformed and challenged photojournalism.

In other words, the digital camera intensifies photojournalism by increasing efficiency, encouraging creativity and experimentation, and redefining the boundaries of autonomy in the relationship between subject and photographer. The key distinction between film and digital camera use is the immediacy of results and output. The digital camera allows the photographer to see images on-the-scene immediately after capture through an LCD monitor on the back of the device. The immediacy of the digital camera impacts how photographers make images and interact with subjects differently than previously experienced with the film camera. Digital cameras enable photojournalists to review, edit, delete and transmit images immediately after capture. The level of immediacy in digital photography means that photographers do not have to wait for their results to be processed, edited and printed, as previously experienced with film. The digital camera’s level of immediacy takes the guessing game out of photography in terms of content, composition and technique, i.e., “what you see is what you get.”

Photo Manipulation

Altering images to change the meaning of a frame is not at all new to photojournalism. However, what is new is the speed at which manipulations can occur.

The seamless and malleable nature of digital information presents great opportunities as well as challenges for a profession, which prides itself on producing accurate and timely visual reportage. What seems at odds here are the conditions and conventions in which photojournalists engage in photographic routines. Photojournalists adhere to professional codes of conduct that can be observed through the expectations and obligations imposed on individuals by the occupational group. Further, the de-centralization of post-production processes signifies a disruption in previously experienced routines and rituals through the elimination of mechanical processes related to film and print development. Previously, it was harder to get away with manipulation because there were always several other sets of eyes involved in the post-production process. This may no longer be true as seen in the case of Los Angeles Times photographer Brian Walski in Iraq. Even more recently the Reuters debacle over manipulated images from Lebanon points out how easy it is to mislead the public.

Wireless Telephony

In 2000, Swedish telecom giant Ericsson teamed up with camera manufacturer Canon to that will combine the technology of a cellular phone with that of a digital camera. Ericsson’s press statement after the company signed the agreement notes. “This technology will enable simple, fast and reliable transfer of images from digital cameras to wireless devices as well as to other consumers or the Internet.''

For years later, Canon introduced its EOS-1D Mark II with its WFT-E1 wireless transmitter. Along with the tethered LAN, the camera can transmit images immediately back to a server for editing and storage.

According to the Mobile Internet Technology Website, “Already today, digital imaging products and wireless devices are two rapidly growing categories of consumer products, and the merging of these two technologies will create entirely new products and applications, such as multimedia messaging.”

Over time as the technology improves, the ability to transmit images back to a server means that communication between photographer in the field and editors back in the newsroom should improve.

Broadband

Up until lately, the ability to send high quantities of information across the Internet has been limited by bandwidth issues. However, broadband access, the telecommunication frequencies available to distribute  information is increasing rapidly. In 2006, the largest number of boardband subscribers, 57 million users, live in the United States.What this represents for photojournalists is that more markets for images will emerge. At the same, the Internet is still in its infancy in terms of monetizing returns on investments. Even though photographers may benefit from having electronic means of promoting themselves and selling images, there is no guarantee that they will find gainful employment.

Photojournalism's Future Leaves a lot to Consider

The debate over the future of photojournalism has come to a head again as citizen media proponent Dan Gillmor started beating his drum once more. Gillmor's commentary is ruffling a few feathers from professionals and media observers not willing to accept, at this moment, any assessment of the field with the word "demise" in the title. In fact, Gillmor's prognostication for photojournalism is anything but new. For more than a decade people have been talking about the changes brought about by digital photography. However, what is striking here is that Gillmor's tone seems to be taking a much more emphatic quality. For example, Gillmore contends:

The pros who deal in breaking news have a problem. They can’t possibly compete in the media-sphere of the future. We’re entering a world of ubiquitous media creation and access. When the tools of creation and access are so profoundly democratized, and when updated business models connect the best creators with potential customers, many if not most of the pros will fight a losing battle to save their careers.

At the heart of this debate resides a tension between how some people define photojournalism as a professional occupation, and how others define it has an art and self-expression. The problem is that people confuse making pictures with making money. For the average consumer of images questions of aesthetics take second-place to content, especially if the subject is recognizable. How else can anyone explain why a fuzzy and overblown picture of Angelina and Brad on a beach in Africa can command millions of dollars from an agency, while freelance photojournalists risking life and limb in Iraq make barely a living wage.

In many cases, people don't even notice compositional flubs such as a telephone pole growing out of a subject's head.  The average image consumer just looks through or over looks such annoyances. What the average image consumer sees is the center of focus, even with all the imperfections.  At the same time, people aren't idiots. People do  recognize quality and photojournalism offers a lot of it. The conventions developed in photojournalism such as the decisive moment, framing, and layering have helped to make the craft into an art form, even in the eyes of the elite. The average image consumer, armed with a  camera phone,will be hard pressed to replicate a picture made by a trained photojournalist. Unfortunately, the professional photojournalist is being outgunned in terms of the increasing numbers of people willing to send in images for publication.

Gillmor's conclusion reveals the heart of the matter here:

Remember, there was once a fairly healthy community of portrait painters. When photography came along, a lot of them had to find other work; or at least their ranks were not refilled when they retired. Professional portrait photographers, similarly, are less in demand today than a generation ago. But portraits have survived — and thrived.

The photojournalist’s job may be history before long. But photojournalism has never been more important, or more widespread.

There may be a day, when the average Joe or Jan with a camera phone will start to think beyond the snap shot and produce images that are not only of-the-moment. People have the capacity to learn and put knowledge into action. What we may see, then, are people making images  not just of breaking news or spot news scenes of train wrecks and police beatings but also images that have aesthetic appeals as well.

This day may not be too far off, and it is this fear that is troubling many professionals.  As one photojournalist argues on the National Press Photographer Association list-serve, "Hire them, and get garbage images with trees sticking out of back of heads."  Another more rational professional observes, "Eventually, I want to believe, the public and marketplace will again respect that good cameras don't make good pictures. Good photographers do. And good photographers aren't necessarily good photojournalists."

What remains important to the profession as well as to democracy is  the authenticity of the frame and the credibility of the individual who produced the image. As Gillmor argues, "What does matter is the utter authenticity of the image, made so by the fact that the man was there at the right time with the right media-creation gear."

A similar battle is raging in the newswriting world as well -- one in which  bloggers continue to encroach on the domain of the so-called establishment press. But just because someone can blog doesn't mean they have all the facts.

If the citizen shutterbug movement does take hold, as Gillmor predicts, it is reasonable to assume that photojournalism as an art form will continue to thrive, while photojournalism as an occupational group will suffer.

As an educator, this issue raises a lot of questions. Why continue to train photojournalists in a world where just about everyone can claim they are photojournalists? What does getting a degree in photojournalism mean when the credibility of the field continues to be attacked as it did last summer during the Israel-Hezbollah conflict. What does getting a degree in photojournalism mean when opportunities for employment seem so dismal?

The best answer to this question is reconciled by the fact that photojournalism teaches us to experience and see the world in ways that few other disciplines can match. Photojournalism is the practice of being engaged in capturing and fixing moments so that we can learn and grow from those moments. What philosophy seeks to do for helping students to think more critically and ethically, photojournalism does in helping students to see, feel, and act in the world. Photojournalism is a visual response to light and life  -- one that seeks to render, explain, interrogate, expose, and discover what it means to be human.

If more people, with camera phones, come to understand and appreciate the complexities of our times so be it.  At issue is not the need for more people with cameras. What is needed are more people with cameras that know and appreciate the device as a tool for illuminating and edifying, connecting and communicating, the richness of our universal human condition. 

In the end, what appears to be happening now is that far too much energy is being expended on fretting over the loss of a professional occupation and not enough energy is being spent on the implications of an informed and visually literate citizenry. 

Another stark reminder of where photojournalism is headed

A businessman stops in front of the giant Christmas Tree in
New York City's Rockerfeller Center to take a picture with
his camera phone.

Credit: Dennis Dunleavy, November 2006.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is linking to a story about cellphones and news content by The New York Times.

Photojournalism Leaps Into the Cellphone Age

Scott Carlson writes, "At first glance, this is technology news: Yahoo and the news service Reuters are going to recruit the general public as photojournalists — the public that is already armed with an array of image-producing devices, be they high-end digital cameras or simple cellphones."

Pictures from camera phones, taken by the general public can be uploaded to Reuters or Yahoo and then distributed to other news services.

Carlson suggests, "Technology news, yes. But it is also another stark reminder that the media are less us here in the newsroom talking to you, and more of you talking to each other. That shift carries responsibility with it. This is an issue for the liberal arts as much as anything."

If true, this trend supports the general theory that information is more about immediacy and quantity than it is about reflection and critical thinking. Camera phones, in this case, will bring new meaning to the old news phrase "Feeding the Beast."

In their rush to get more and more content into the public domain the question arises as to who will be responsible for editing and vetting this new flood of images. Chief among media shortcomings in recent years has been the lack of oversight in checking the veracity and fairness of images. Some new system will have to be put into place if the "Beast" can be trusted.

 

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.

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.

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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.

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.