Article stats: Views: 1004 Votes: 10 Average: 5.00 Added: 2007-04-04 Updated: 2007-04-05 | |
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There used to be a phrase: Photos don't lie.
Once that was partially a true statement. Now, nothing could be farther from the truth.
While studio tricks could be used to help a model's looks during a shoot and darkroom techniques could produce final enhancements well before the digital age, the ability to morph an image from one thing to another has become commonplace in the present era through the easy manipulation of pixels.
In the world of journalism, photographers have always faced a difficult task. Their photographs must tell a story without also telling a lie. For that reason, photojournalists have lost their jobs for adding elements to a photograph that weren't there in the original shot. The same has held true--mostly--for photographs in which the scene has been posed in some way. For instance, the famous picture by Joe Rosenthal of the World War II Iwo Jima flag raising. Rosenthal was accused of having set up the second flag raising to make a better picture. The facts were that an editor in Hawaii was responsible for misidentifying the flag raising as the first flag to go up. Rosenthal had no control over the event and merely recorded what he saw. But newspapers, news magazines and television news are compelled by their ethical codes to identify a posed or recreated image as such in order to maintain credibility for true news images.
Even there a gray area exists, as every working photographer knows. Enhancements that improve the image without changing the fact of the image have slipped under the ethical barrier many times. The simplest example is a that of a bright sky in a picture. Under ordinary conditions, with a straight image going to reproduction on the page of a newspaper or magazine, the sky can be so blocked out that you can't see where the frame of the image ends and the unprinted page begins. Dodging and burning techniques were developed to compensate for such problems. Areas that were too light could be selectively burned in by additional exposure of the denser portions of the negative. Areas that were underexposed in a negative could dodged by placing something like a cutout piece of paper or one's hand between the light source and the photo paper to hold back the light while the rest of the image could be exposed normally.
Many famous pictures show one or more of these effects. It becomes a simple matter, then, to go a step farther and remove a flaw entirely. A pimple on a politician's face, for example. The greatest deception of all time as far as journalistic ethics go was the complete omission of any representation of how crippled U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt actually was when he ran for president the first time and for the rest of the time he was in office. It wasn't a lie if it wasn't shown, right? Mark Twain once said a lie of omission was the biggest lie of all.
Portrait photographers and glamour photographers could never stand that sort of scrutiny in the first place. Their livelihood depends on the client liking the results of a photo shoot. An older woman getting her first "crowsfeet" does not want them in her portrait. Playboy magazine and all other magazines that feature beautiful women in sexy poses have employed skills that predate the digital ...
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