‘No teats in a family newspaper’
In light of the
I was once a P-I copy boy who carried art orders from editors to the art department, where [Post-Intelligencer artist Bob] McCausland and the others touched them up, usually by applying white-out brush marks. The orders often included photographs that needed features tastefully erased. Among the requests I saw, or heard about, were orders to paint the balls off a German shepherd, the fat off a matronly lady’s ankles, and the udders off a cow. “No teats in a family newspaper,” an editor said.
Back in 1981-82, I answered phones and took sports scores in the
Folks, of all the things ethically questionable things that damage newspaper credibility, altering photos like these to instances are the last thing newspapers need to worry about. No harm, no foul.*
NOTE: OK, folks. Ryan Johnson (read the comments) has convinced me that any altering of photographs shouldn’t be allowed in newspapers. I don’t think all instances are unethical, but I do think the line is too hard to draw.
Billy Dennis is a former reporter and editor at small daily and weekly newspapers in Illinois and Missouri. He comments on media, news and politics. He also owns and operates 
BULLSH!T This is an issue of ethics and trust just like getting a story factually correct. The photographers job is to capture the moment, not make up the one they want. You wouldn’t say it was ok for a reporter to put words in someone’s mouth. Any photographer caught manipulating or misrepresenting a photo should be fired immediately
Ryan: I am impressed with your vehemence on this issue. Tell me, do you see NO difference between making the sky appear to be a prettier color and faking a photo to put a politician appearing with Jane Fonda anti-war rally? Do you equate taking the arm of an athlete out of a photograph with a New York Times columnist altering the words of a politician to make it seem that he has a poor grasp of the facts?
This is one of those issues on which some people — especially those who get their ethics out of a college j-school text book — like to take absolute positions. It’s easy to hold up a policy banning all photo manipulation and claim to be more ethical than the newspaper down the street. It’s harder work keeping out the more subtle ethical lapses that really do affect the public debate.
Anytime you touch a picture for a news story, you are changing the context. Anytime you print a picture that is taken out of context, you are lying to your audience.
ie. this week’s picture of Condi Rice (I believe it was in Rome) where it appears she’s holding her head in frustration when in reality she was fixing her hair. The AP misrepresented the picture when it sent it out to subscribers and gave the reader of those publications the wrong idea.
(I can’t find a wider picture, but here’s a close-up.
Also, look at the picture of Rice where the editor decided the lighting on Rice’s face was too dark and lightened it up. Doing something that seemed innocent enough ended up causing the picture to look like Rice was possessed. This appeared in USA Today
There’s the picture of Martha Stewart on the cover of (I believe) Newsweek. They took Stewart’s head and put it on a model’s body. It made Stewart look like she lost a ton of weight and got a boob job while in prison.
And the OJ Simpson covers where they darkened a mug shot to make it look more intimidating.
(both here – http://www.nppa.org/news_and_events/news/2005/03/newsweek.html)
I’m speaking as a former news photographer. Altering images for any reason is unethical and you run the risk of alienating your readers. The trust in the mass media is already pretty low and photo editors do not need to take any chances.
Ryan: Good examples all of unethical altercations of photos or misrepresentation of what the photos depicted.
Now I ask again: How does altering the color of the sky in one photo and painting out the arm of an athlete in another compare to these cross ethical violations?
Answer: They don’t. The question isn’t whether photos can be used in an unethical matter. They can. The question is the wisdom of zero-tolerance policies that are supposed to prevent ethical lapses, but don’t and instead crete a false sense of ethical purity.
“Altering images for any reason is unethical … ” That’s an opinion, stated as fact. I am challenging you to provide evidence.
I don’t have any hard statistics on this, but I think the advent of digital photography has actually decreased the kind of thing Bill saw in the Toy Department at the Journal Star in the early ’80s.
The ease with which photo content can be altered, and a couple famous incidents that led to endless ethical discussions (remember the famous missing Coke can at another paper?), has probably led to less photo manipulation. And I think a photog is probably a lot more likely to be fired for such a thing than he was 20 or 50 or 80 years ago.
Cropping, of course, is an entirely different matter.
It’s just ethics. I mean, I don’t think I’ll be able to convince you it’s wrong. News photography is supposed to be telling a story as it is. What differnence does it make if the arm’s in the shot? Why does the color of the sky need to be changed?
Is it ok for a photographer to say to someone, “Can you do that again?” when they’ve missed a shot or tell them to do something because it will make a better picture?
The job of a journalist is to caputre a moment, not make it up. I’ve worked both in TV and at a newspaper. There are problems in both. Altering photographs in any way for any reason for news purposes is unethical.
I’ve seen you write before that you “clean up grammer” when you write stories. Again, my feeling is that is unethical. Your presenting someone as something they’re not. If you change a sentence from “They ain’t comin’ home no time soon.” to “They aren’t coming home anytime soon.” you’ve changed how the reader sees this person. That person just went from an uneducated hillbilly to a middle class soccer mom just by making a minor change. It’s the same with photos. What was this sky photo of? Was the color change from a bright blue sky to a gray sky? That changes the mood of the photo.
And I agree with the previous poster, there’s a difference between cropping and altering. As long as you don’t change the meaning of the photo with cropping, your not changing the intergrity of the photo. If you crop out an important element, then your faced with an unethical change.
Ryan,
As for the OJ Picture – I get so tired of reading about this one. This is a personal pet peeve of mine.
That photo-illustration was done by Matt Mahurin – it was not done to purposely darken Simpson’s mugshot, but done in Mahurin’s artistic style.
I wish people would get off of their lazy rear ends and look at his work before using this as an example of racial bias or messing with the integrity of anything.
Yes, he altered the image, but in his artistic style and not out of some sort of nasty agenda.
PS…..and I’ll try and find my copy of the book “An American Tragedy” by Theodore Dreiser to see if the cover has the same sort of illustrative style as the Time cover.
Also, I imagine if one could find an interview with Matt Mahurin he probably explains his rendition of the Simpson mugshot to that of how many very old police mugshots appear and was trying to link a historical feel of “An American Tragedy” to that of a current story.
In other words, Time probably told him, “Here is the title to the lead article, can you come up with an image in your particular style that would go with the article.”
A news magazine is not a place for artwork.
It was an altering of a photograph used in a news story that changed the meaning of the photo. I don’t really care what the photo editor has done in the past.
Art is not news and shouldn’t not be presented as such.
The Martha Stewart cover was meant to be an illustration, but because it wasn’t presented as such, it set off a firestorm against Newsweek.
News magazines and newspapers need to be careful that they are not misrepresenting an image.
I’m sorry, Scott. I’m going to have to agree with Ryan on this one. This wasn’t harmless at all. How can anyone, aware of the charged racial politics surrounding the simpson case, not be aware of how it would offend people to see a black man charged with murder to appear even darker.
I’ll admit that Ryan’s POV on this issue is beginning to grow on me.
Here’s the Rice photo from this week that I was talking about…notice the caption. “US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (R) gestures as Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora speaks…..” (emphasis mind)
Rice Photo
This link should take you to a video showing what she was really doing during this photo.
Ryan: Yeah, I see what you mean. A good editor would have chewed ass upon seeing that cutline with that photo.
Ryan,
Matt Mahurin is not a “photo editor”. He is an artist. And come on, look around at the news weeklies. Images are changed all the time. But I agree it is different if they are altered in such a way as to alter intent.
I’m just correcting you and Billy when it comes to Mahurin and his cover. He got a raw deal over it and continues to do so and it is wrong.
You two are missing my point completely and are ascribing your intent and perceptions on the meaning of something else.
For example, when I saw that cover, knowing of the before mentioned book and of Mahurin’s past work, I took the cover to mean here we have a black man who supposedly had made it in American society, was well liked across all society levels and now had been arrested for murder, thus, “An American Tragedy”.
After Time contracted with Mahurin, Mahurin’s artwork was wrongly criticized as racist (If anything, much of Mahurin’s artwork is critical of the government. One of his most widely known pieces is critical of the arms race and of a man chained to a warhead and chewing through a limb to get it off.)
And if you and Billy want to use examples of photojournalism that actually lack integrity, then pick better examples, because Mahurin was not trying to say something like “be very afraid of the murdering man because he is black.”
neither one of us mentioned anything about race until you brought it up. My point is about altering an image and presenting it as news and not an illustration.
“Images are changed all the time. ”
That doesn’t make it right and that’s the point I’m making. I put the blame on Time, not the artist. The NPPA (National Press Photographers Association) has worked hard to change the perception of photographers as JOURNALISTS, not artists. When things like this happen, it’s a setback to the entire profession. The public does not trust the media and they do not trust photographers.
This whole issue is about trust in the media. Time’s cover caused them some credibility.
“US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice® gestures as Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora speaks…..â€
“Gestures” is AP’s favorite verb in cutlines. I suspect AP requires its photogs to pass an illiteracy test before they are hired.
Ryan,
Your mention of darkening Simpson’s picture to create intimidation meant what then?
And go back and look, Billy interjected race before I did. I just brought up the fact Mahurin’s work was deemed racist when it was not. It was simply a mimic of old mugshots and crime scene photographs of old.
I agree with you on your Rice issue – but if you watch all around many, many times, all media is manipulated to tell the story the story teller wants to tell.
oooh, I’m so with Ryan. It makes me SO MAD when I see the same AP photo in the Chicago Trib and the Journal Star and one of them has flipped it over horizontally. I HATE that. (Also, any sports layout person or editor who is dumb enough to do that WHEN THERE ARE NUMBERS IN THE PICTURE needs to be SHOT.)
I find that photos flipped backwards, when I don’t know they’re backwards, make me feel disoriented and uncomfortable. When I KNOW they’re backwards, I just get MAD about it. It’s cheating. What else have they changed? What else am I not seeing that ought to be there, or seeing that ought not be there?
I generally flip fashion magazines upsidedown, which makes it a lot easier to spot the airbrushing (the shadows get all funky; the look okay right-side-up, but upsidedown they’re wrong), but ever-advancing photo software is fixing those lighting issues. Pretty soon there will be no way to tell when a photo is lying to me, and that scares me.
If it’s going to be “photo art,” it needs to say that pretty prominently and on the page the photo appears on, not buried somewhere in the back. I have nothing against photo art; I just want to know when I’m looking at that as opposed to straight-up photos.
On a semi-related topic, when there’s a photo of an academic in front of the books in his office, I always look at the rightmost and leftmost books cropped into the picture. Photo editors all seem to have the same teenaged-boy-disease where they try to crop the dirtiest-sounding title as the last book in the frame.
That’s a pretty racist comment Scott…are you implying only blacks can be intimidating? Cause I sure wasn’t.
Jesus, Ryan – Your above reply is EXACTLY why people in this country can’t have an honest discussion about race. I make a comment about a comment you made and then you throw out the “racist” label.
Tell me, WHERE did I type “ONLY BLACKS” can be intimidating? I didn’t and it is disgusting you would imply otherwise.
Here is your comment:
“And the OJ Simpson covers where they darkened a mug shot to make it look more intimidating.”
Just exactly what does it mean? If you are going to discuss this particular picture, then discuss the entire story, not just what you want to.
And be honest here – when it comes to the Time OJ Simpson cover, any truthful person discussing this picture knows that the discussion must include race.
Lastly, I think you and Billy are combining a whole bunch of issues and doing so in an incomplete and disingenous way. Yes, there is a huge difference between altering a picture or using a picture in the wrong context to tell an untrue story (i.e. your Rice example) but there are many instances where it can be done without becoming a lack of integrity issue.
For example, let’s say Time or Newsweek decided to do a story about the deflation of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s popularity in California and used a photo of him in his prime where they deflated his muscles to make them look like those of a 99 pound weakling. What is wrong with this?
Scott,
I think the difference between Arnold being made to look like a 98-lb. weakling and OJ’s altered mugshot is that Arnold as a 98-lb weakling would look cartoonish; it would obviously be a political cartoon and nobody who knows who Arnold is would think the picture was real. Whereas with OJ’s altered mugshot, whether it was art or racism, looked like an unaltered police mugshot and Time doesn’t put photo credits on the front cover, so you really had to LOOK to find out it was photo art. I didn’t. I thought it was “just a mugshot.” I thought it was a real picture.
With photo art, there’s a huge difference between “obviously” altered and “subtly” altered. The latter can be extremely misleading.
(And I’m not trying to be disrespectful using first names only … I can’t spell Arnold’s last so I’m not even going to try!)
Eyebrows,
Your constructive critique (and I use this word not in a negative way at all) of my Scharzenegger example shows exactly what a broad subject this can be and how changing the appearance of a photo does not have to have some sort of underlying agenda at all.
In an early branch of this, Billy stated something about how no photograph on a newspaper should be altered in any way. I disagree – to a point. To me, as long the change is noted or does not change the content, accuracy or factual intent of an image, then changing a photo can be done.
As for Time’s OJ cover, without having the issue in front of me I can’t say for certain, however, they usually list cover credits on the inside page, just like many other magazines do. And I would imagine back then they would have given credit to Mahurin for his ‘photo-illustration’.
And like I’ve early explained, a person can pick up many books on old mug shot shots and crime scene books (of which I have many in my own library) and see the Simpson cover was an obvious homage to those style of photographs (the simulation of the flash not reaching around the edges of the picture).