Disaster, duplicity and deception

God only knows how someone could watch scenes like those which played out live on TV yesterday, showing a tsunami striking Japan, and then go about doctoring photographs of such a disaster for their own twisted entertainment.

As the tsunami made landfall in the north of the country TV pictures show it didn’t so much as blink. The ocean swamped low-lying farmlands at a speed too great for those on the coastal motorways to outrun it but cruelly, just slow enough for them to be able to try.

And within minutes started the falsifications, misrepresentations and internet hoaxes.

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Journalist or activist?

It’s certainly not unheard of for photographers to cast themselves in the role of activist. Good photography helps to make an argument a whole lot more persuasive so the link is no surprise. But we should worry when they blur the line between activist and journalist because you can’t be both, although some examples of those who try can be found amongst photographers who cover war.

There’s a number that describe themselves not as war photographers but as anti-war photographers. We may find the level of commitment required to fulfil this tag admirable, especially when shooting a wedding can pay more than being shot at, but such a description admits they’re pursuing a role that goes beyond neutral observer, impartial witness and professional journalist. It’s an admission that their intention is to portray things in their worst possible light in support of the counter argument, and it gives rise to the claim that their work is propaganda for that cause.

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Photography, balance and bias

Plenty gets said and written about bias in the media. The perception of the extent of it is part of the reason that public confidence in the journalistic trade is often said to be on par with that of used car salespeople. But this is mostly a case of perceptions over reality, where people with bees in their bonnets hunt for “evidence” for as long as it takes them to find it and then call that representative. Still, there’s no doubt that the odd journo does let their worldview colour their work from time to time.

But photography too has plenty of potential to corrupt fair and balanced reporting.

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Who said a photo never lies?

It’s an affront to readers and photographers alike when a newspaper or magazine uses photography to tell a lie. Such dishonesty ranges from publishing a picture that amounts to mild misrepresentation, through to running one that is itself entirely fake.

At the low-end of the scale are the file pictures pretending to be current, or those that are loosely captioned because they aren’t quite of the moment in time they should be, or the photograph of an isolated incident that doesn’t fairly represent the bigger picture but is published anyway because of its attention-grabbing charms.

What we thankfully see less of are examples from the high-end of the scale: the outright and unadulterated lie. But here’s one that is simply off the charts.

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How’s this for digital doctoring?

In Australia we tend to give our media an ample serving of skepticism – more than it deserves if you ask me. But an ethical atrocity like the one unearthed by Egyptian blogger Wael Khalil this week puts most others in the shade.

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Authenticity is simple enough if you just stop faking it

The Australian Federal election campaign has to this point consisted mostly of shallow and confected photo-ops and simplistic sloganeering. There is generally one stage-managed event enacted for the cameras each day, crafted to illustrate whatever policy announcement the party is planning to unveil.

However the Prime Minister Julia Gillard has acknowledged in recent days that Labor’s campaign strategy has not served her well, and to that end she has announced that for its remaining weeks she will take personal control and that from now on Australians will get to see ‘the real Julia’.

But if it’s authenticity the PM wants, there’s a pretty simple way to go about achieving it. She wouldn’t even be pioneering new ground, because the White House and Downing Street have been doing it for years.

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Political propaganda of the visual kind

When the PM travelled to Perth yesterday it was always going to be an opportunity for political theatre. The trip had been identified by mining industry strategists as a key moment in their public campaign against his government’s proposed new “super profits” tax and Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest lead a TV ambush as good as any.

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Photographic fraud: it’s been with us all along

World Press Photo announced recently that photographer Stepan Rudik, who received third prize in the Sport Feature Stories category of the competition, had his award revoked for excessive digital manipulation. Organisers compared one of Rudik’s winning submissions to its RAW file following a complaint from the Ukrainian Photography Union, and he was ultimately disqualified for excising part of a foot and its owner from one of his pictures (compare them here).

While the competition rules are simple enough, and Rudik himself accepts the decision, some dissent evidently exists. The essence of the counter-arguement is a debate over how journalism and artistic license should co-exist; that the final work is the product of the artist’s vision.

But we are of course talking about visual journalism here, not art photography so while it might make for an engrossing debating subject for some, this sort of subversion of the truth simply never flies in professional circles and is the sort of act that has cost its perpetrators their jobs time and time again.

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