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.
