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.

Play by play: The social function of news images

Photo Credit: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

Pictures have weight -- sometimes they crush. The social function of news images reside not only
in their capacity to inform, but also in their ability to entertain. In our increasingly visual culture, pictures must draw and hold the viewer's attention.  Perhaps it is for this reason that editors believe pictures must be packaged and repackaged for us.

The social function of news images is grounded in the rhetoric of persuasion. Just as a lawyer may seek to sway a jury to his or her side of an argument, a picture, through its variety of visual cues, establishes a context of understanding that shapes perception and constructs a sense of reality.

The analysis:

"Mr. Clemens" -- the subject -- the sign -- in soft-focus foregrounding leads the eye upward to a carefully framed center of Mr. Clemens. 

Pictures, as David Fleming (1996)  eloquently contends, cannot be in and of themselves seen as arguments, but inevitably they seem to be able to cause a few.

The pictures freezes, frames and fixes in our memory a moment in time that can conjure up other memories. With the stoppage of time the persuasive determinacy of the picture emerges. Pictures may be a species of rhetoric, as Susan Sontag (2003) claims, for the very real sense that they appear before us as rational and orderly entities of time.

In this case, Clemens' testimony before Congress on steroid use may bring to mind other high-profile hearings such as in Iran-Contra with Oliver North or Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas'  appointment to the Supreme Court.  The low camera angle is iconic in that it produces  a recognizable perception in which the subject is made to appear larger-than-life.

The camera angle is not trivial or a trick since it modifies our sense of a normal eye-line match. In other words, speaking in terms of grammar, the camera angle acts like an adverb -- it modifies the subject.  Further, the sign, in this case, "Mr. Clemens,"  is indexical and points toward formality, courtesy and solemnity. The gesture is wholly symbolic. Clemens' look away from those questioning him, his raised hand suggesting defense.  In addition, the essential framing of Clemens with his pseudo-archangelic lawyers. The gestures of  Clemens' lawyers speak  louder than words. Here we have the million-dollar pitcher in the proverbial "hot seat" and is million-dollar lawyers act as his intellectual bodyguards.

As mentioned earlier, news images function to both inform and entertain, but the real objective of making pictures is to make us think. Any object in the world, and pictures are objects, that can make us think about bigger ideas and issues can't be all that bad.  We shouldn't have to settle for someone else's interpretation of the world if what is represented only serves to reinforce a status quo. The ultimate objective of a news image should not only be to serve us a preconceived packaged reality, but to wrestle with convention and conscience.

The evidence:

Recently, this point was brought home on the Magnum photo site when Christopher Anderson's bare-bulb approach to photographing presidential candidate Mitt Romney came under fire from some viewers.  Anderson's approach was the "anti-photo op." Tired of making the same stale and banal images that most of the press pack gets of the candidates, Anderson blasted Romney through what appears to be a rain-splattered lens.


Click to go to Magnum's Picture of the Week

In his defense Anderson commented:

These events are rather ridiculous. they are staged and repetitive....It was a conscious decision to flash with this technique. It is as if throwing too much light on it might somehow expose these campaign photo ops for what the really are. The designers of these events want us to make a pretty picture. but a pretty picture to me felt like something that would be false to this event. I almost thought of the flash as being like an xray that would reveal what I really see at an event like this.

Anderson brings up one of the biggest challenges faces photojournalism today -- mediocrity. If news images do not seek to edify they run risk of becoming nothing more than someone else's spin. What we are tasked with here is to understand the relationship between the art of making news pictures and the larger implications of how these pictures function in society.

Picturing the emotional candidate

An inordinate amount of attention is being paid to Hillary Clinton's emotions these days as people search for ways to separate her and her Democratic contender, Barack Obama.

Headlines recounting Clinton's emotions such as,  "For Crying Out Load: Hillary Turns on the Tears Again", "Hillary's Crying Campaign: The Tears of a Clown" and "Hillary Clinton's Crocodile Tears," signify how gender bias impinges on this year's presidential campaign, at least on the Democratic side. Pictures showing Clinton wiping her eyes or attempting to control her emotions in front of the cameras continues to set off a media frenzy, with bloggers leading the way. 

Where is the substantive news value in repeatedly running pictures of the candidate rubbing her eyes or blowing her nose?  Are we to assume that an individual would not make a good president if they cannot control their emotions publicly?

It is difficult to say conclusively that coverage focusing on Clinton's emotional displays is having a negative impact on her chances to become the next president, but in a world that remains dominated mostly by men, it doesn't seem to be helping her all that much.

Photo Credit: Getty Images

Anthropologist Catherine Lutz notes that emotions are culturally constructed as signs of danger, irrationality, and weakness – characteristics commonly associated with women. Please note the term "culturally constructed" because this is where many of our interpretations come from.

When a picture captures the viewer’s attention, it puts into play cultural beliefs and values associated with gendered emotional displays. Some right wing media have jumped on Clinton for her emotional moments claiming that she is using tears to garner sympathy and votes.   New York magazine, for example, began an article about Clinton with the lead, "Yep, it's official. Hillary Clinton is running to be Crybaby-in-Chief," and The New York Post, not known to be overly kind to liberals, began their reportage with "It was another two-hanky day on the campaign trail yesterday, as Hillary Rodham Clinton teared up at an event targeting female voters on the eve of the Super Tuesday." elections."

Robinson (2002) suggests, “Most work on gender and emotion has stressed how a gendered rhetoric of emotional control reinforces women’s subordination within societies that privilege rationality, self-control, and the stable boundaries between interiority and exteriority that emotions appear to breach.” 

This may help explain how some media have turned on Clinton's outward expressions of emotion as a sign of weakness.  But, research describes emotion not only in terms of the physiological changes of an inner-self, but also as social, cultural and linguistic operator (see Catherine Lutz's research).

The two images shown here exemplify the antithesis of the “boys don’t cry” stoicism of the American male experience -- a domain which Clinton threatens to disrupt if she were to become president. The photographs suggest a turn away from American middle-class "emotional culture" promulgated by the belief that men, not women, are obligated to control emotions for the greater good of the country.

Cultural morays and beliefs are inextricably bound to emotion.  As Catherine Lutz argues, “Western discourse on emotions constitutes them as paradoxical entities that are both a sign of weakness and a powerful force.”  To show emotions makes the person experiencing feelings weaker or deficient in character.

Hillary Clinton is not only running for president  this year, she is challenging a male dominated paradigm which preconditions public performance and cultural outlook. Tears, in this case, threaten the stability of this paradigm because we believe that emotion is irrational and unstable. Could it be that the recesses of Hillary Clinton's inner life, through the pictures we see of her, undermine her opportunity to become our commander and chief.  Perhaps, in the end, America is not mature enough to handle an emotional presidency, since individuals who wear their hearts on their sleeves are often considered unfit to serve.   

Photo Contest Is a Referendum on the Human Conscience

I wrote another blog piece for Black Star Rising about Tim Hetherington's World Press Photo "Best of" picture. Some of the comments offered by the judges started to make me think about what this picture really means, culturally and politically.

Pictures, Memories and Emotions

There is little doubt that pictures affect how we not only understand the world around us, but also how we feel about it. I have been wrestling with coming to terms with the relationship between pictures and memory. I think there is a connection between what we see and what we remember. It is the memories that are stirred up by a picture that trigger emotion. In turn, emotion is closely associated with beliefs, values and norms. From our beliefs we begin to act toward something. Since pictures can be emotionally charged objects, the individual processes feelings both subjectively and objectively.

I am thinking of John Moore's image of a man reacting to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. In the image, the man's outward expression of shock and disbelief is carefully framed symmetrically, with a tangle of mangled bodies on the ground behind him. If an image could sum up the emotion of grief, this one would do well. There is little ambiguity about this image, despite attempts by mainstream broadcast media to blur out the bloody bodies.

What memories does this image trigger for us?

Photo Credit: John Moore/Getty Images

Susan Sontag, in Regarding the Pain of Others, observes, "It seems that the appetite for showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked." Memories of the collapse of the World Trade Center and a century of countless images of calamities from around the globe come to mind. Memories, as Sontag suggests, alter the image, according to memory's need to confer emblematic status on things we feel worthy of remembering. The emotions associated with images depicting emotion are complex.  We may feel shame, fear, anxiety, disgust, anger, sadness, and remorse. But there is also another side to emotional control -- one that conjures up relief that such events as the Bhutto assassination do not occur in our neighborhood. There may also be feelings of alienation, disconnection and disbelief. Here we find the image to activate a memory-emotion-belief cycle. This cycle assumes   that for someone to experience an emotional response to an image there must be some value belief system behind it. We feel, because we believe in larger, more abstract and symbolic constructs, than physical pain. Belief systems underpin our emotional responses to the images we see. The norms and values we hold for ourselves and others are constructed by the cultural norms we share. We are taught that violence is wrong, yet wars and killing remain a reality. Images of violence do not seem to deter us. Media, from video games to Hollywood films continue to celebrate the objectification and degradation of the human body and spirit. How, then, could one picture -- such as the one John Moore has made -- move us from the belief that violence is wrong to a call for action?

This is a morally complex question since many people might argue that there is little or no connection between what we see and what we end up doing about what we see. At the same time, I believe that cultural norms are in a state of constant negotiation between the essential self and the social self. If more people took the time to reflect upon the values held closest to the center of who they think they are, the essential self, then, the possibility of changing our social self would emerge. The social self is the outward expression of who we present ourselves to be in our every day life -- who we think other people think we are. If we are truly moved in our essential self by an image to act, then our social self will change.

One way to think about the tensions between the essential and the social self is to consider symbolic behaviors. In Moore's picture, despite cultural, ethnic and religious differences, the symbolic behavior of grief and horror is clear to us. Pictures, as a visual language, transfer  symbolic behaviors across the cultural and linguistic barriers that often divide us. At the same time,  we remain divided and disharmonious species.

Unfortunately, the habitual ways we are conditioned to respond to violent image influences  our capacity to separate reality from fantasy and fiction. Our habituated ways of seeing, understanding, and acting, also impinge on our ability to respond emotionally to images depicting violence and suffering. Pictures are indeed a form of agency, they goad us to think and act out of the feelings that they conjure up for us. But our visual culture has become so saturated with such pictures that the capacity for images of violence to shock is diminished. As Sontag contends:

"Making suffering loom larger; by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to 'care' more; It also invites them to feel that the sufferings and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any local political intervention."

We live in a world where sentiment and emotion is exploited by external forces. How much control do we really have over our feelings? From this perspective, images desensitize our capacity for compassion. In this way our memories appear to fail us as we can longer distinguish between  essential experiences and socially constructed realities.

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.    

Photo of WWII correspondent Ernie Pyle resurfaces after more than 60 years

Photo Credit: Alexander Roberts/ Via AP/ Richard Strasser

He is among the most venerated war correspondents in American History. When Ernie Pyle died in April 1945, covering the battle of Okinawa, the country mourned his loss. Pyle was in the prime of his journalistic career and had developed a style of war-reporting that was riveting and heart-felt.  Richard Pyle of the Associated Press reports that pictures showing Pyle's death were censored by the government and then lost to memory for more than six decades. Recently, Alexander Roberts' image of Pyle's body resurfaced. Historically, the image is important in that it reminds us of the sacrifice people pay for freedom.  Pyle knew the risk he was taking in covering the war, but this picture reminds us of what that risk would ultimately mean.