by Matt Barr

Is the problem with doctored photos our expectations?

The hoohah about doctored pictures coming out of Lebanon and being syndicated by Reuters highlights a lot of interesting issues, most of which haven't been gone over by the al Reuters, MSM SUX people.

What prevents reporters from making up (or embellishing, if you prefer) their reporting from poorly accessible areas where editorial notice can't be taken? Nothing! you may say. Well, not quite. News services do things like require double- or triple-sourced material to guard against the possibility of printing or syndicating stuff that's not true. Rules bend when you're trying to get news from a war zone (or that impugns the Bush administration, say), but there are all sorts of safeguards in place to ensure reporters can't just make shit up.

I wonder why there isn't a similar requirement for photojournalism. Or is there? I'm not saying you'd need two photographers to take pictures of the same thing before you ran one, but why not require some other witness, where feasible, to what's taking place in a picture? Any objection you have to this it seems to me you could also have to requiring reporters to double-source.

The reason there aren't the same standards in place may be our sense that pictures don't lie. But now that we're to the point where any numbnut can Photoshop, that's no longer true.

More abstractly, why do we sense that pictures are more reliable than reporting? Reporters can frame their narrative a certain way, emphasize one thng at the expense of something else, leave a part out entirely that might make a difference to your conclusion... .all things photographers can do without software. Editors routinely crop and clean up pictures, and rewrite the photographer's caption.

Unlike narrative, you can ensure that your message is included in a photo as a condition of the photo being taken at all, or at least direct what's depicted and what's not. As Jim Lewis mentioned in Slate, if a photojournalist wanted to photograph Ronald Reagan at Bitburg in 1985, they had to do so from a vantage point that ensured they couldn't get both the President and Nazi SS graves in the same shot. Twenty years later, presidential shots like this are routine (especially on Fox News!).

And none of this even gets us into what's possible with digital photography that wasn't before it. Lewis:

Even the cheapest chip-based pocket camera lets you set white balance, color effects, aspect ratio, and a dozen other parameters and automatically interpolates pixels based on its best guess as to what came through the lens; and such tweaking isn't tampering, because the image doesn't exist until these decisions are made.

He mentions the case of a Chrlotte Observer photographer who was fired for altering a photo to make the sky color more like what he'd seen. Don't we expect reporters to accurately describe what they saw? Why do we have different expectations of photographers? Don't say it's because we don't trust that they're bias-free; do you trust that reporters are?

As images become as manipulable as narrative, maybe it's time for double- or even triple-sourcing of photos. As with reporting, rules could bend when necessary, and so maybe this wouldn't prevent pictures from bombed-out neighborhoods in Lebanon from being doctored, but it may still make sense.

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