Political cartoonist Mark Fiore produces weekly animations for Newsweek. I’m not sure I’ve ever watched any of his cartoons before, but this one, found via Newsweek’s odd Tumblr blog in turn found at the Nieman Lab, is well worth the price of admission. We’ve talked before about the environmental cost of new digital technology, and this cartoon sums up the issues all too well.

Following up on our previous coverage, Marco Vernaschi let us know that the Pulitzer Center has published another post about the subject, “Uganda: Response to Critics.” The post includes both a response by Vernaschi and a note from the Pulitzer Center Executive Director Jon Sawyer. The response specifically addresses questions raised by A Developing Story and Vigilante Journalist and includes a link to an interview with a Ugandan lawyer about the inadequate police response to the murder of Margaret Babirye Nankya, as well as a video of Vernaschi’s interview with the girl’s mother. Of specific note, also, is Vernaschi’s statement about removing another photo from the project, this one of a child’s coffin. Three bodies were exhumed in a separate case and this coffin was one of the exhumed bodies.

What started as a long accusation in a lightstalkers thread has turned into a large-scale discussion involving a Pulitzer Center apology and coverage on the Guardian website. Marco Vernaschi’s coverage of child sacrifice in Uganda (another with the offending image removed and another) for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting initially looked like a hard and gritty glance into a little-known-outside-of-Africa problem of ritual child sacrifice. Issues of exoticism and the colonialist view notwithstanding, numerous bloggers began lobbing serious allegations of paying for access, illegally exhuming a child’s body to take pictures of the corpse, child exploitation, and outright fabrication. A Developing Story raised some strong questions of both Vernaschi and the Pulitzer Center. The Pulitzer Center took time in responding to the allegations. Other bloggers led the charge, with Anne Holmes of Vigilante Journalist providing invaluable investigation into the case with Ugandan authorities. Holmes had previously interviewed Vernaschi for her blog and has retracted those articles due to concerns about Vernaschi’s ethics and journalistic process. The Pulitzer Center has issued a statement responding to these allegations, in which it agrees that the bounds of journalism, ethics, and human decency were crossed. Asim Rafiqui has a great perspective on the issue, as does Tewfic El-Sawey. Pay special attention Rafiqui’s analysis of the motivations for a photographer to manufacture a story as regards the media eco-system of photojournalism awards, publications looking for sensationalism, and historical portrayals of Africa. “Mr. Vernaschi’s transgression is not just that of an individual, but of an industry that never fails to trip over itself chasing the insane.”

As for the case at hand, a particular picture (now gone from the photographer’s site) depicted a young boy, nude, whose penis had been cut off and replaced with a catheter, all in full view. The image, duckrabbit argued, and which the Pulitzer Center eventually agreed with, violated the dignity of the child and, as such, went against various protections for children created by the UN, the UK, and other legal systems. The BBC, in fact, had previously run a photo of the boy, but did not show his face out of concern for the boy’s safety and dignity.

More worrying (well…I’m not sure there are levels of ethical reprehensibility here…it’s all pretty bad), Vernaschi asked a family to dig up the body of their murdered daughter so he could photograph the corpse (that picture has also been removed from the internet), as he explained in a post on the Pulitzer Center’s Untold Stories blog. The photographer said he was gathering evidence. Whether or not this is the role of the photojournalist, these actions cannot be excused. The exhumation violated local laws as well as most journalism and human ethics. While we can’t fault a photographer trying to drive home a story with shocking, hard-hitting pictures, staging a situation with money and violating bodies of the dead is well beyond any acceptable practices in journalism or human decency.  These ethical transgressions poison the entire story.

And while this controversy has gotten the pictures (and perhaps the story) to a wide audience, Joerg Colberg at Conscientious sums up the problem quite well at the end of this post, “Lastly, lest we forget this, there actually is a real story that needs to be talked about: child sacrifice in Uganda. But what will people remember? Will they remember the facts about child sacrifice in Uganda? Or will they remember a photojournalist who needed to get photos so badly that he had a dead child dug up (using money to achieve his goals)?”

And while some would say that after the Pulitzer Center’s apology, the problem has been satisfactorily dealt with, Asim Rafiqui entreats us to go further: “Not enough has been said on this issue. There will be some who will argue – move on! I say, No! Remain, think and consider. This touches on the very fundamentals of the future and meaning of our chosen craft. What is the intent of the work we do, and who are it’s audience? What is the role of journalism in our society, and in particular, what and how shall we engage with the world around us so that we see them not as alien, but human and worthy of being taken seriously? Too many young photographers are seduced by the mythologies of the craft. Mythologies that are woven by the practitioners and their publishers. Its time to stop, take stock, and weave better stories, and suggest better and more meaningful means of working. Its time to produce real stories and do so by finding real humanity and a sense of equal dignity and respect.”

Audubon Magazine - Picture Perfect

Audubon Magazine has just published a fascinating look into the world of wildlife photography and recent controversies regarding the use of captive animals. You may remember the recent disqualification of José Luis Rodríguez in the British National Museum of History’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition for using a captive animal in the winning image.

A friend of mine recently sent this Guardian article on World Press-winning photos of a stoning in Somalia to me. It starts off with a typical Sontag quote, but it’s worth a read. I’m not sure if Colberg’s excellent recent post (on the recently-redesigned Conscientious) Why We Must See is a direct response to the Guardian piece (it does mention the photos in question), but it might as well be:

To say that we want to read, but not see… That just seems like an easy way out. Seeing is not the same as reading. What I read about I can file away, because it is being processed while I take it in. What I see – there is a lot of processing, but there also is the unbearable immediacy. -Jörg M. Colberg, “Why We Must See”

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Stepan Rudik - World Press Photo 2010 - disqualified 3rd place Sports Feature

Stepan Rudik - World Press Photo 2010 - disqualified 3rd place Sports Feature - offending image

Stepan Rudik - Original crop

Stepan Rudik - Original File

“After careful consideration, we found it imperative to disqualify the photographer from the contest. The principle of World Press Photo is to promote high standards in photojournalism. Therefore, we must maintain the integrity of our organization even when the outcome is regrettable.” -Michiel Munneke, managing director of World Press Photo

Lens, PetaPixel, and BJP all have good coverage of the latest photo manipulation scandal in photojournalism: World Press Photo has disqualified Stepan Rudik, 3rd place Sports Features in the 2010 contest, for an ethics violation. Rudik removed an element of a picture (see the slideshow above) in violation of World Press Photo contest regulations against image alteration, specifically this rule: “The content of the image must not be altered. Only retouching which conforms to the currently accepted standards in the industry is allowed.” The object seems to stem from the removal of a person’s foot from the background of the picture, which Rudik defended to the BJP, saying, “the photograph I submitted to the contest is a crop, and the retouched detail is the foot of a man which appears on the original photograph, but who is not a subject of the image submitted to the contest.”

I’ve got to echo Asim Rafiqui: What a laughable extreme crop and toning job. Color and tilt correction in photoshop is one thing, moody vignetting in photoshop is another, but this is a whole new level of turning a crap photo into something entirely different. Wow. This, rather than the offending foot, is the bigger problem for the credibility of photojournalism.

Saw two interesting things from Time Magazine’s website today:
Adam Ferguson, part of the VII Mentor program, returns to Afghanistan for the magazine and produces a quite nicely narrated slideshow about life for US troops in Wardak Province. Ferguson was recently featured on the Wired Magazine blog Raw File, where you can see his first Time cover. BAGnewsNotes wrote about his most recent cover, which comes from this same assignment, in the post Afghanistan Update: In a Bind. The pictures may be very one sided in perspective (but quite nice as photographs), echoing other pieces from embeds in remote outposts, but Ferguson’s audio backing helps elucidate his, and the subjects, questioning the idea of “why are we here?”

Secondly, while playing with Time’s new iPhone app, I stumbled upon an odd piece titled “France May Put Warning Labels on Airbrushed Photos” with this funny quote,

“When writers take a news item or real event and considerably embellish it, they are required to alert readers by calling the work fiction, a novel or a story based on dramatized facts. Why should it be any different for photographs?” [Conservative parliamentarian Valérie Boyer] asks. “Rules on food-labeling let consumers know the origins of the contents and the presence of things like additives and preservatives. What’s wrong with … informing them when photographs have also been modified from their original form?”

This is an old argument, but apparently (I have no verification besides this article) it is gaining some traction in one of the most historic nations for photography, which has perhaps regressed (consider the purpose of Luc Delahaye’s “L’Autre” book) a bit from the heyday of H C-B, Ronis and Atget.
I think the sentiment is honest and surely most photographers who work in “straight” photography would love to have some bulkhead between outwardly manipulated images and what they try to do. But I don’t think it is possible, we’ve gone too far and the lines are too thin and/or blurred. And a $55,000 fine for failing to label a photograph as manipulated sounds very strange.

John Vink over on this post on Lightstalkers brought up a very interesting case: two students, Guillaume Chauvin (23) and Rémi Hubert (22), upon winning a Paris Match photojournalism prize, announce that they have faked the pictures in their entry as an exercise and indictment of photojournalism. Here are the original images from Paris Match, from a story about “homeless students”, and this is (through rough google translation) the article from Liberation describing what happened.

One of the setup photographs. (Very rough translation: I can not go to the University Restaurant every day and I do not go to the Restos du Coeur. So I go to the markets and I give to friends who can go cook. Armin, 23, Master of Sociology.)

They revealed the deception during the award ceremony, reading a text in which they describe their “artistic” action as an “attempt to challenge” the “workings of a media discourse that has the ingredients for convenience and voyeurism in the representation of distress.” “It was said that it would be a good opportunity to reveal the mechanisms of some news does not check his sources and information and relies on sensationalism,” says Rémi Hubert.

What do you think? A valid (respectable? responsible?) form of criticism?

As for me: I think that this is a very provocative (and perhaps intelligent) approach to breaching this important subject, but I need to know more about their motivations… as I’m not convinced this is ultimately a responsible approach. I don’t think (or, I don’t want to think) that journalism is doing such wholesale falsification of stories, as these two students have done, and thus their actions go far beyond the more subtle point they’re trying to make. Bob Black has the first nice response on that lightstalkers thread; I think I am agreeing with him.

Also, I want to ask the students, what would you have done had you not won this award and gotten that stage to make your written statement? What would the message have been then?

Be sure too to read some of the comments left on the Liberation article for a taste of how the French public is reacting to this revelation and statement. Some are very interesting.

(Last, sorry for the crude translations, I hope they are reasonably accurate as I had to revise some of the grammar for it to make any sense. If you’d like to contribute a non-google translation I would be happy to amend ours)

Taliban tactician holding a rifle that is not his - photo by Zackary Canepari - published and retracted by The New York Times

As PDNPulse initially reported, the New York Times issued a retraction this week regarding the above photo by Zackary Canepari.

“A picture on May 5 with the continuation of a front-page article about the porous Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and the strategic advantages it offers to Taliban insurgents fighting American troops, showed a silhouetted Taliban logistics tactician, who was interviewed for the article, holding a rifle, creating the impression that the weapon belonged to him. The Times subsequently learned from the photographer that the rifle belonged to the owner of a home in Pakistan where the interview took place, and that the Taliban tactician had held the weapon only for the purpose of the photograph.

“Had The Times known this information at the time of publication, it would not have used the photograph to illustrate the article.” -New York Times editors’ note

The photo was removed from the Times website, but since the initial report of the ethical breach, the photographer’s identity was ferreted out, as was the photo in question. PDNPulse’s report included this line to readers, “Do you think this is over the line?” and others online have argued that this isn’t a big issue. This is wrong.

Unlike the other recent photo manipulation charge to hit photoblogs, Danish photographer Klavs Bo Christensen’s overzealous color correction that led to disqualification in a photo contest, Canepari’s transgression purports to show visual facts that are not true. The photo misleads viewers of the photo into thinking that this particular military strategy on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border involves more armament than it actually does. There’s a temptation to discount the complaints about the photo because the photo doesn’t look manipulated and because the facts aren’t far off from what the photo shows. That is, guns are likely involved in this particular operation, as they are in most military operations, so who cares whether or not this particular person actually carries a weapon or not?

Photo manipulation is most harmful to a reporter/photographer/publication’s credibility precisely when it is most subtle. We can all laugh at the more blatant photoshop disasters, but no one mistakes the obvious manipulations of images as representations of fact. The Danish photographer’s pictures may push the bounds of acceptable journalistic post production practices, but the cartoonish colors in the image obviously stem from artistic impulses rather than an intent to mislead and misinform. One can reasonbly expect a layman to realize that the colors have been consistently pumped up a bit just because one rarely encounters such vivid colorization in reality.

But, when a picture looks like the truth (i.e., when what looks like a documentary image is, in fact posed, or when a basketball is cloned into a picture of a high school match), viewers believe that it is the truth. Guys with guns are the norm in pictures from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. A layman could not reasonably discern the manipulation in Canepari’s picture as a falsehood or artistic interpretation in a portrait situation. The image, which was presented by the photographer as a documentary account of the Taliban logistics tactician as he normally operates, is a deception. If an image that looks very real is fake, what guarantees that any images in a newspaper show the facts as they are?

The New York Times acted correctly in retracting the photo.

Your thoughts?