Thursday, November 20, 2008

Photo Ethics: the AP Bans all Images Provided by the Department of Defense

Apparently, the DoD has no compunctions about heavily editing their photos before releasing them into the world. According to the BBC (from which the below image is shamelessly stolen), the AP caught on to the alterations in General Dunwoody's portrait only after sending the photograph to its clients. Since this violates their rules of photographic ethics, they immediately retracted the image and banned all photos provided by the US Department of Defense – at least until they can put some safeguards in place.

AP says that adjusting photos and other imagery, even for aesthetic reasons, damages the credibility of the information distributed by the military to news organisations and the public.

"For us, there's a zero-tolerance policy of adding or subtracting actual content from an image," said Santiago Lyon, AP's director of photography.


As you can see, the image was not merely retouched (I'd be surprised if every image run in any publication isn't retouched) but has the United States flag added as a backdrop:



The army, of course, maintains that they did nothing wrong:

Colonel Cathy Abbott, chief of the US Army's media relations division, said the Dunwoody photo did not violate army policy that prohibited the editing of an image to misrepresent the facts or change the circumstances of an event.

"We're not misrepresenting her," Col Abbott said. "The image is still clearly Gen Dunwoody."


The whole thing is pretty funny, in a way: we can't even trust the military not to lie in their photos! But while it seems obvious that news sources can't accept altered images, the issue is not so simple in practice. Considering that this is their choice of official portrait, I'm not sure the Army did do anything wrong. At the least, the AP seems to have an unrealistic view of the digital world, not to mention photography in general.

The problem is, there are no obvious lines between retouching and altering. Does the removal of pimples or stray hairs count? Changing the color balance? Combining multiple shots to make a panorama or increase the dynamic range of the ultimate exposure? What about altering the color of the sky by taking a color sample – but no actual pixels – from another image? Or opening someone's eyes in a group portrait by cloning in their face from an image taken mere seconds later with precisely the same configuration? Above all, though: what about selective cropping, which has always been a completely unavoidable problem in photography?

Obviously there's something wrong if photojournalists are allowed to make images look however they want, with no regard to the situation when they were taken. I'm actually something of a purist about photography, and essentially never use Photoshop to do anything to my own work besides dusting and light color correction. But as I say, this is an official portrait: what difference does it make whether the Army took the time to stand her in front of a flag in real life, or after the fact?

It's all too easy to cling to standards, as though they'll reliably preserve the truth or force us to correctly represent the world. The fact is, though, they won't: the image alone is never sufficient for truth. Photographs never portray the situation "as it actually took place." The correct course of action isn't to cover that up with relatively arbitrary rules, it's to make people aware of what photographs are, and what they mean.

5 comments:

  1. I do like that they couldn't even be bothered to find a real-looking flag, that's a pretty shitty photoshop.

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  2. They also made her wider. I guess that makes her more aesthetically pleasing. America does like fat people.

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  3. I love the military's response.

    AP: "For us, there's a zero-tolerance policy of adding or subtracting actual content from an image"

    Army: "We're not misrepresenting her," Col Abbott said. "The image is still clearly Gen Dunwoody."


    Because zero tolerance means...

    @ JN, seriously, for the amount of money in defense contracts, you'd think they could pull off a better photoshop.

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  4. I do like that they couldn't even be bothered to find a real-looking flag, that's a pretty shitty photoshop.

    Haha! She looks like a cardboard cut-out! And while I could sorta see the flag coming out looking like that if the photographer had a weird lighting concept... it'd have to be a pretty weird lighting concept.


    They also made her wider. I guess that makes her more aesthetically pleasing. America does like fat people.

    It could also be that they made the photo on the left narrower – I suspect it isn't the original either (though closer to it), since there's more detail in the one on the right than in the one on the left.

    But yeah, fattening/thinning and perspective crops: that's another way that photo manipulation rears its head in relatively untraceable ways.


    @JJ: ...yeah....

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  5. OK, I'm bored again. What can you expect. Look, I just spent way too long looking through this tripe just to prove a point to the nutty "pretty sure" prof.

    Much as I hate to think about it now, I'm pretty sure I'll be back. You brain wrecks are just too much fun.

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