Visual Journalism

My colleague, Prof. Barry Hollander, was walking around with a sheet of these journalism warning labels from Tom Scott this week. Very entertaining stuff, but it got me thinking, do we need a set for photos?

Time to put your thinking caps on and create a few. My contributions:

• Warning: This brilliant photo is a total fluke. It’s the only sharp image I shot this week.
• Warning: We found this image on the web, we have no way of knowing if it is real. Also, we don’t have permission to use it, so don’t tell anyone.
• Warning: An editor with no knowledge of this story selected this photo. It may or may not make sense in the context used.
• Warning: This image was provided to us by Aunt Sally’s cat, who fell off a bookshelf and landed, paws down, on her 1973 SX70 Polaroid. Had we not eliminated our photo staff, maybe we would have had a photo of the cat falling.

Justice has been served, although it is unclear if the judge who allowed Los Angeles Times photographer Al Seib to shoot in her court and then prohibited him from publishing the images. Though it is unclear if the original judge understands the error she made.

Los Angeles Times photographer Al Seib requested permission, in writing, from Judge Hilleri G. Merritt to photograph the arraignment of Alberd Tersargyan and was given the okay. During the arraignment, the judge (based on requests from lawyers involved) rescinded permission – and then told Seib he was not allowed to publish the images he had already made, according to an LA Times story.

This will be interesting to watch – will the Times run the photos? Will Judge Merritt hold Seib (or the Times) in contempt if they are published? Will the judge rescind the order? It would be a clear case of prior restraint if enforced, something the U.S. Supreme Court has never allowed to stand.

Guy Reynolds, the photo editor at the Dallas Morning News who found the altered golf image of Matt Bettencourt has talked with the (now) former Getty Images freelance photographer who made, altered and transmitted the image. (Reynolds’ original post is still online which explains how he found the image and what he did.)

In the update, Marc Feldman claims Bettencourt’s caddie said one of the images would be better if he (the caddie) weren’t in it. Feldman quickly removed him from the image to show what it would look like and thought he saved the image to his desktop, but instead it ended up in a send folder and found its way to Getty Images.

It all seems plausible and I’m sure that’s exactly how this whole event transpired. That’s not sarcasm – I’m sure he’s telling the absolute truth here.

But the fact that he’s telling the truth bothers me even more.

There are several ethical and professional issues at play here.

Visual journalism is under fire quite a bit these days. There’s a persistent belief that because it is so easy to manipulate images and because there’s a need to produce more compelling imagery to get noticed in our visually-saturated world that photographers (and editors) are willing to do whatever it takes to get an image to sing. Feldman, even with his 26 years of experience, decided to show off. Had things not gone wrong, his smallest problem would have been reinforcing the idea that digital manipulation is so easy that everything should be suspect. That alone is a huge problem – when we’re fighting for our credibility, why would you demonstrate how easy it is to erode that credibility? Why not say, “Maybe it would be a better image without you in it, but this is the way it happened?”

The second ethical problem comes up with a twist. Getty Images holds contracts with both news organizations – to produce editorial content – and professional sporting organizations – to produce public relations material. It’s unclear which of these sides Feldman was shooting for (and, unfortunately, it’s likely he was producing for both), but if it was the editorial side what was he doing showing the images off? It could pose shield law problems in some jurisdictions and, at the very least, puts him in an awkward position if the golfer says he doesn’t like the image. Does he then kill it? Find another frame? Ignore him?

And then there’s a professional problem with the workflow that both Feldman and Getty Images have in place. Why was there no double-checking of the images in his send folder? A quick glance would have brought it to his attention. And why did no one at Getty Images’ photo desk catch this? It’s the same moment, from the same angle, just a different crop – it’s pretty clear something is amiss.

In my early freelance days, I worked for the Associated Press for several years. Now we can fault the AP for many things, but one of the things I will sing their praises about was the photo desk staff in New York. They went through my images – and captions – with a fine-toothed comb on every single image I transmitted. (I remember one very long Independence Day conversation with an editor over whether I had a 105 mm or 75 mm howitzer cannon in a photo. I ended up calling the National Guard for an answer before they’d send the image off the satellite.)

So what can we learn from this? Several things … if you’re shooting for an editorial client, no one but you and the client sees those images … if someone suggests “cleaning up” an image would improve it, explain that in journalism the truth improves everything … and, for goodness sake, check what you’re sending – and receiving.

Otherwise, Feldman is absolutely right in what he told Reynolds:

“Sometimes you make a mistake and it’s fatal. I made a fatal mistake.”

According to a story in Photo District News, Getty Images has terminated its contract with a freelance photographer after it was found he had removed a person from the background of a golf image. They issued a kill order and removed the image from their archive immediately after the image was found by a photo editor at the Dallas Morning News.

Damon Kiesow pointed out

(Screen capture from the New York Times.)

a New York Times article about The Economist altering a Reuters image for their cover. I mean, really? After everything else that’s happened over the last few years, deleting people from an image is the way to put together a cover on a purported news magazine?

Since I don’t subscribe, and the Times article doesn’t say, did they at least label it as a photo illustration?

I was horrified (though not surprised) to see this post on Curbed.com and relieved to see the comments about doctored photos in real estate listings. Hopefully not many people are buying houses without actually visiting them.

Very refreshing to see real people worrying about ethics.

(Thanks to Mark Hertzberg for the link via the NPPA discussion list.)

Not in a cout-of-law sense, but an on-the-street sort of law, journalists are seeing increased awareness of the presence by law enforcement personnel – and not necessarily in a good way. A recent article on Gizmodo highlighted several instances of questionable arrests and detainments. Al Tompkins at the Poynter Institute went a few steps further in talking with a couple of attorneys who specialize in media rights.

After meeting the new fire department chief in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, at his swearing in ceremony, we talked about what changes he planned on bringing to the department. High on his list was more training and I was soon invited to participate in a live-burn exercise at an abandoned house. The dramatic photo, shot from inside the building as it burned, ran large and was tacked up in every station across the city.

It’s been several years since I worked on the streets but a significant part of my career involved covering spot news – fires, car wrecks, murders, hurricanes and other major storms. In more than a dozen years, I never had a confrontation with a police officer or other official. In that same time period, almost every one of my colleagues had several. It’s entirely possible that I was just lucky, but it’s also possible that it was because of the way I handled those situations.

I tried very hard to balance my needs as a photojournalist with the needs of the public safety folks, being very aware of where they were and what they were doing. Staying out of their way played a part in it, as well as my penchant for shooting with longer lenses. Keeping that working distance may have helped.

Some photojournalists would go so far as to try to befriend the people they covered, giving them prints from scenes and such. That, to me, was going over the line – it’s okay to be friendly to those you cover, but becoming friends raises some larger issues when it comes to those you cover. It was always a professional relationship built on a respect for what each of us needed to do.

Our roles as journalists are no more important, nor less important, than those of the people we cover. Thinking our presence is of greater importance is going to lead to a conflict. And, as a wise old editor once told me, right or wrong, you can’t make a picture from the back seat of a cruiser.

I’m not sure what to think about this yet … but there seems to be a movement to use wiretapping laws against photojournalists.

This is just strange … a photojournalist in Haiti posted photos shot moments after the earthquake earlier this year and posted them online, linking to them via Twitter. Agence-France Presse picked up the photos and distributed them … without getting his permission.

He complained, sent cease and desist orders and sent them a bill. Now, AFP is suing the photojournalist for, ahem, “antagonistic assertion of [his] rights.”

No, I do not know what that means. But it does allow me to plug this recent addition to the National Press Photographers Association’s Convergence 2010 conference (of which I’m the chair): the American Society of Media Photographers will be doing their copyright presentation as part of the NPPA conference in Charleston, South Carolina, from July 8 through July 10.