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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »