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?

Playing "god" in a digital age: The thin line between art and the subjectivity of photojournalism

Jarle recently commented on the post  "Crazy light", in which I wrote: "We are constantly challenged to make scenes that are less than interesting, more interesting." The question that this raises, however, is when and how are the conventions of honest visual reportage bent for the sake of making images more compelling? 

Jarle continues:

Correct. We all strive to make our photos more interesting. But, ethically and philosophically speaking, isn't this in direct conflict with the "our pictures must always tell the truth" mantra?

There's often a thin line between photojournalism, "art" and subjective, commentary photography.

And, playing the devil's advocate, what's the difference between adding motion blur in Photoshop and using a slow shutter speed?

I'll start out by agreeing with much what Jarle has said here. From a purist perspective, "Straight" photography should be a style of photography that records what the eye witnesses without elaboration or embellishment. For the most part, this form of photography, what is photojournalism today, has remained pretty much true to form. At the same time, it is possible to find quite a few examples of photojournalism from the 1980s to the present day, that deviate from the normal conventions.

Photo Credit: Craig Aurness/National Geographic

As Jarle notes, "ethically and philosophically speaking, isn't this in direct conflict with the "our pictures must always tell the truth" mantra?"

Perhaps.

The image above (shown only partially scanned here) was made in 1987 by Craig Aurness and featured in National Geographic's 100 best pictures (2002).

According to the NPPA Code of Ethics, photojournalists should "Be accurate and comprehensive in the representation of subjects." The language here seems a bit vague. The language is vague because ultimately it is up to the photographer or his or her editor to determine what  "accurate" and "comprehensive" really mean within a specific context. Is Aurness' image and honest, fair-minded and "accurate" representation according to National Press Photographers Association guidelines?  In a sense, Aurness has created for the viewer an image that human eye is incapable of seeing. The human eye captures motion at 1/10th of a second, but it also has the capacity to follow a scene without disruption. The optics and mechanics of a camera far exceed the eye in this manner. Therefore, in a case like this, what constitutes a comprehensive and accurate representation?

This issue may actually be more about cultural tastes and values than it is about ethics. Cultural conventions and tastes change over time, but at the heart of any photographer/audience relationship is whether or not the image is deceptive and misleading. Digital manipulation has created a crisis of conscience for many photographers, simply because it has become so cheap, fast, and easy to embellish, construct, and correct images. So much depends on the context in which the picture is made. Motion blur in news photography has been an accepted practice for many photographers for decades. Motion emphases action and helps to make the reading of a scene more meaningful and comprehensive. Just as depth of field can add 3-dimensionality to a two-dimension image, adding motion is a "trompe le oile" or a photographer's way of tricking the eye.  However, is it appropriate or ethical to create motion after the fact -- in PhotoShop?   Most photographers would probably say no, it's unethical to manipulate images in order to produce an effect after the picture was captured.                

                                                               

Stephen Krasemann's 1985 award-winning picture of a leopard running with a recent kill was made before PhotoShop techniques came into vogue.  Today, however, viewers are more sensitive to representations they perceive as manipulated or altered in some way. Whether, the general public perceives motion blur and panning as a manipulation remains to be resolved.

Analyzing the image above, can we say unequivocally that a breach of ethics has occurred? Has the context in which the event took place been manipulated by my choice to employ a slow shutter speed? Is the scene somehow more inaccurate and less comprehensive a representation give the fact that the human eye is limited by how much motion it can see at a given point in time?  Should photojournalists be required to photograph scenes at 1/10th of a second or higher to ensure that they are more truthful to the human eye?

These questions, and so many others, evoke a great deal of thought and emotion. At the same time, this "thin line" between photojournalistic convention and subjective "artistic" approaches mentioned by Jarle remains unresolved, because ultimately the decision resides with what the photographer believes to be right or wrong. So much of our decision to frame, freeze and fix a moment in space and time depends not only on context, but also on our motivation for being there in the first place.

The 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.)

Photography is not dead, just different

Discussions concerning photography's demise as an art form are always problematic and provocative. If we consider how digital technologies have influenced photography in the past two decades, we need to place the debate within a larger context.  Consider how painters must have felt in the mid to late 19th century when photography emerged as a viable alternative to capturing realistic representations. At that time, photography was the "new technology", which surely stirred up lots of emotion.

For centuries, painting was far from experimental. Artists were concerned, in large part, with realism -- the ability to make objects in the world appear real on a two-dimensional surface. Many portrait artists lived off the making visual likenesses of their patrons with paint on canvas. Photography's influence on painting cannot be overstated. With the invention of photography, painters were released from the constraints of realism. For example, the early impressionists of the 1860s, artists such as Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh and others, were inspired by candid photography. The impressionists were able to take chances with form and style. Photography's realism filled a niche -- it was faster, less expensive, and more accessible than painting. Further, you didn't need to have extensive training in drawing and painting to produce a representation of the world around you.

Photography is not dead, it's just changing. Just the same it changed in the 19th century for traditional artists.

Today, the commonly held perception that a photograph provides a reasonable likeness to what is seen in the "real" world is changing. Digital technology, with its capacity to reconfigure reality, is viewed as a threat to the status photography once enjoyed as a form of conveyance  -- one burdened by the responsibility of being perceptually accurate.  We now have cameras that can make people look thinner, remove blemishes, correct color and tone, and sharpen the clarity of the pictures produced. Visual veracity is now in the mind of the beholder. Pictures, however, may still be worth a thousand words, but what makes the medium difference today is that the technology is increasingly able to determine what those words may mean.

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

When photojournalists turn to Art for Inspiration Some Cry Foul

Photo Credit: Elissa Eubanks, Atlanta Journal-Constituition

When photojournalist Elissa Eubanks' picture of Atlanta's Veterans Day parade ran on the front page, some readers were less than impressed with her attempt to turn a run-of-the-mill assignment into something a little different. Unfortunately, some folks didn't see the art in cutting Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, the parade's grand marshal, head in half. The effect did please Constitution-Journal editors, but some readers have expressed outraged -- claiming that the picture was demeaning and disrespectful.

Are photojournalists working too hard to make images more appealing and interesting?

Are photojournalists becoming overly focused on making "art" rather than practicing bread and butter visual reports of everyday events?

I am not suggesting a return to the days of the "shin-plaster" or the "grip and grin," but there is obviously a line between the science and art of doing visual journalism.

Eubank's picture raises issues about how the public perceives the role of journalists in covering civic events. Photographers appear to be making aesthetic choices that take them further away from the realm of journalism and more into the realm of art. Maybe it's not that big of deal. Photojournalism, as a form of artistic expression, is certainly better than it has ever been and there is some great work being done today. However, many readers don't want or even expect their news to be artsy. Readers want and expect their news to be delivered with without embellishment or panache -- that what journalism should be about. Unfortunately, in today's hyper-media world the pressure is on not only to inform but to also entertain.

When a news picture is treated as art in order to distinguish it from other media, the public may actually see the effort as a gimmick, or even worse, as a disingenuous attempt to sensationalize the news.

In fact, the framing technique used in Eubank's picture is a relatively recent addition to the photojournalist's bag of aesthetic techniques. A few decades ago, a photographer turning in such an image would be given a ton of grief over the approach. Just like shooting pictures at odd angles with slanting horizons, the technique of cutting into a subject's face has emerged as convention only since the 1980s, when news moved away from its antecedent "hard" format to one that is much softer.

The stylistic conventions applied to many news pictures today are infused with artistic sensibilities that were discouraged just a few decades ago. Today, photojournalism, as an art form, has evolved, even if readers don't always appreciate the difference.

This picture is a lie

A self-portrait made with an Epson flatbed scanner
invites an existentialist's claim -- pictures confound
our attempt to define meaning, identity, and reality.

We hold the likeness of self as irrepressible and undeniable.  We look for clues to reassure ourselves that what we see is actually who we are. We hunger for authenticity and self-actualizing records to make ourselves feel whole.

In the persistent visual clutter of our day to day universe we seek images that help us define meaning and rationalize our existence. But the conscious mind may be easily misled.  Pictures can indeed lie. Images inculcate us to expect a truth, at least some fragment of it. But what happens when we can no longer count on images as mediators of truth.

The poet Robert Bly wrote, "How much sadness we feel because we have given up expecting truth. Every moment of our lives we exchange comfort or discomfort for statements we know are lies, or mostly lies..."

Bly's idea suggests that we negotiate truths, half-truths and lies -- we settle for what we know as truth because we have little capacity to dispute it. I would extend this argument to images, especially news photographs. In this hyper-mediated world of visual, where pictures increasingly play a role in shaping public perception of the "real", we want to believe that what we are exposed to will be free from the ideological self-interests of those in positions of setting the agenda of public discourse.

As a culture, is there some underlying sense that we have really given up  expecting the truth from the things we see?

Even Extremists Use Photoshop: Osama bin Laden's makeover

Photo Credit: AP via As-Sahab

It appears that Osama bin Laden's propagandists have been taking some Photoshop lessons lately.

Typically, over the past few years, Bin Laden's screen shots have been less than aesthetically interesting or eye-catching.

Now, as the extremist continues his war of words against all-things capitalistic, especially America, there's someone cleaning up his image, complete with feathered knock-outs and dynamic new background colors. Instead of bin Laden's usual mountain gorilla look, his publicists are now busy photoshopping him to appear other-worldly and prophet-ish.

In some ways, it might be concluded that either bin Laden's stature among his followers is gaining ground, or that his political operatives are finding it increasingly necessary to elevate him through visual representations that make him appear more holy and dignified. Either way, it is curious to consider the sophistication of techniques used to sway opinion and project an increasingly mythic and metaphorical likeness of the figure over time.

Seam carving and the slippery slope of visual veracity

Technological innovative appears to be out pacing our capacity to understand and maintain some of the conventions inextricably bound to the  ethics of photography, especially photojournalism.

Researchers Ariel Shamir and Shai Avidan have figured out a way of reducing and enlarging the size of images that they describe as content-aware seam carving. The process allows the Photoshop user to extend pixels in one dimension while reducing them in another, which is much different from antecedent resizing methods.

Photo Credit: Shamir & Avidan

In other words, it is now possible to resize an image while maintaining the scale of the most important features in the picture. Shamir and Avidan call the process the "judicious" reduction or expansion of pixels along along a seam. The seam carving program repeatedly carves out and inserts seams along a path of connected pixels.

Photo Credit: Shamir & Avidan

It shouldn't come as a surprise that smart people like Shamir and Avidan are coming up with new ways of changing the content of our pictures to suit tastes and aesthetics after the fact. At the same time, technological innovation give us something to think about in terms of how fast these changes are occurring.

We are increasingly moving into an era where post-production processes such as seam carving determine our ability to discern how we come to decide what is deceptive and unethical. 

Newspaper promotes photo digital manipulation with readers

The Boston Globe is encouraging readers to send in Photoshopped versions of their favorvite Red Sox players for publication on its Website. Dozens of poster-type images have been e-mailed to the Globe and then posted Online. All in good fun? I guess.

The bigger issue here is that in an age of questioning the credibility and authenticity of digital images, especially in journalism, why shouldn't the newspaper think twice about promoting the practice of photo fakery?

Encouraging the public to rip-off copyright protected images from the Internet and then digitally manipulate them does very little to help people understand the importance of intellectual property rights as well as ethics in a digital age.

The Globe has been careful to make sure it covers itself though. According to a notice on the submission page, the Globe reminds readers that they must have the appropriate permission to use any of the artwork submitted and that the work is original.

By submitting your Photoshop image(s) to Boston.com, you agree that such Photoshop image(s) and the accompanying information will become the property of Boston.com and you grant Boston.com permission to publicly display and use the Photoshop image(s) in any form or media for any and all purposes. You also warrant that (i) the Photoshop image is your original work, or is properly licensed, and does not violate the copyright or any other personal or property right of any third party, and (ii) you have obtained any and all releases and permissions necessary for our use. Your submission also allows Boston.com to edit, crop or adjust the colors of the image(s) on an as needed basis.

This raises the issue of what constitutes a copyright violation when the creator is appropriating other images to construct a collage.

It's highly unlikely that the creator of this Photoshop masterpiece actually owns the rights to the faces of the ballpayers in the collage. Therefore, it appears that the newspaper must be viewing the submitted work as illustrations and not pictures composed of multiple works that are copyright protected.

All in all, the practice of encouraging readers to take material off the Web and alter it, speaks to the slippery slope we are traveling on in terms of not only the veracity of what is seen, but of how really easy it is to manipulate how we see it.

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.

Inspiration from the eyes of the young

A few weeks back, in my High School Journalism Workshop, I had a student who made images that inspire me to think more carefully about how young people see the world differently than I do. In particular, I think young photographers have a different perspective on how we should consider the relationships we have with our subjects.

Atiana's images are complex because they speak to something that often is ignored or underestimated in the discourse about the role of photography and society.  Atiana's images seem to confront, honestly and naturally, the role of "self" in the picture making process.

There is no escaping the reading of this picture (above) as an image of a child's quirky expression. However, this is also a self-portrait of Atiana with her family.

The layering and juxtaposition of "self" against a tightly composed frame of the "other" makes me think how much of the photographer comes out in the image -- visible or invisible.

In fact, every image we make has as much to do with our own sense of place in the world -- our own sense of "self" -- as it does with the subjects we choose to capture.

Interestingly, much of what we consider the "best" photography seems to attempt to avoid any overt display of conscious of "self" in the process of constructing an image.  There is this feeling that the subject must be somehow "out there" and not "in here" -- referring to how the camera tries to act as an omniscient eye on the world.  The camera is often used as a tool to distance ourselves from the reality we are trying to capture. The emotions we desperately attempt to convey are therefore not our own but those of the subject, victim, or object of desire.

When young people are learning to make images, it is clear that there is a lot more sense of self in the pictures than when compared to someone who has been around a while.

The young look to photography as an exploration of who they are in the world -- they have yet to comprehend fully the aesthetics how the outside world is formally framed by the conventions of art and culture. What we get to see, then, is a rare and refreshing perspective of the photographer as who they are in relationship to their environments and experiences. What we get to see is a reflection, in this case literally, of the photographer as interloper and trespasser on time -- the stealing of moments and the capturing of fleeting whimsy.  At the same time, we also get the sense that the picture also speaks directly to the discovery of "self" in an innocent and refreshing way.

 

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.

The now and then of photojournalistic routines

Aaron Johnson's latest "What the Duck" cartoon demonstrates how far we have come in thinking about and accepting technology's  impact on photojournalistic routines and rituals.  In the past years, there seems to have been a fairly universal shift in the benefits digital technology offers photographers.

There is no question that  digital technologies have leveled the playing field for many users. Today there appears to be a perception that because picture making is easier and faster, the need for specialized knowledge once requisite in the field is no longer valid. In other words, the distinction between what it means to be a professional seems no longer to hold true, or, it is at least changing.

The bottom line impact on photojournalism is that news organizations as businesses can now try to cut corners around hiring professional photographers. There is nothing new about this trend, in fact, the writing has been on the wall for a long time now. The bigger question is how will photojournalists respond to the challenges forced upon them?

 

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.