Let's talk about Photoshop! We've been covering it in class, and now everyone has used it a bit, so I think now is a good time to talk about how it fits into news photography.
There are as many stances on the use of Photoshop or related editing programs for photojournalism, as there are news entities. Stances range from a firm 'no editing' policy, to allowing various cosmetic edits that do not 'alter reality' like the policy at the OU Daily.
You may be thinking, "What is the harm? A little photo editing here and there couldn't hurt anything!" I used to agree. Many news outlets do a fine job upholding said rules, and only employ editing software in tasteful, restrained ways.
I don't want to talk about them.
We're going to look at the bad apples in the bunch. The reason I think letting highly powered image editors exist in newsrooms can be a pretty awful idea, at times.
Recently, the Huffington Post did a write up over an article that was posted on the Daily Mail's website. As if they weren't in the news themselves enough for the wrong reasons. According to the article (and screen grabs of the website) Daily Mail wrote about Gwyneth Paltrow and the P.M.’s wife, Samantha Cameron appearing at a fashion event together. The problem? Accompanying their article was an obviously edited image of Mrs. Cameron and Ms. Paltrow.
 |
| From Anorak.UK |
 |
| Huffington Post |
Was such reality bending really necessary? If they appeared anywhere near one another, then cheating with angles or a telephoto lens could have made them appear closer together than they in truth, were. Or even resort to extreme close crops of both so you couldn't tell where they were in relation to one another. I'm not saying that's right by any means, but it is a little less egregious than outright digital lies.
You may argue that no one is expecting such accuracy from a little throw away story like that, so why bother? Well, because it isn't many steps between what happened here and what happened on Der Zeitung back in May. Many of you can recall unaided the images that covered most newspapers the day after the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Barak Obama and his closest aides hunched over laptops around a table, concerned faces all around. A Brooklyn-based Hasidic paper published an article running an edited image, but edited in a very different way. Photos Courtesy of New York Daily News.
 |
| You must at least admit, they do a great job of getting rid of them. Maybe Photoshop 6 will have a "Remove anyone with ovaries" filter. |
 |
| The real image. |
No women to be seen! Zeitung claimed it was following Jewish modesty laws by removing the women, but altering photos in such a way is pretty indefensible, whatever the excuse.
Perhaps I'm overreacting, but when I see this image, I can't help but thick that the novel 1984 is finally coming true. Granted, there has been altering of photos for political reasons since the cold war, at least, but we're finally to the point that they're impossible for the layperson to detect. Simply removing all women (or minority of your choosing) from the historical (which is what news becomes, eventually) record is a pretty frightening concept.
If it was just too immodest to have fully clothed women in their newspaper, then they should have used censor bars, mosaic blurs or what have you. Then at least we'd know that some people were there, rather than letting us pretend they had no role in the shaping of history.
