...DEBATE: World Press Photos and Truth.

...there is another threadhere about the fantastic entries in this year's World Press Photo competition: but this blog post by Allen Murabayashi did make me think:

http://blog.photoshelt​er.com …nt-and-the-truth-matters/

There are "before and after's" of the award winning image and a previous article by Allen (before he had seen the "before" image) here. As to the debate: do you guys agree with Allen? I'd put my thoughts down here but to be honest I'm not quite sure.

I agree - I like the original better. I don't mind him bringing some of the blue in the sky back. To me, these types of images - those meant for press, publication, journalism, etc. should be altered very little and a successful shot would not need to be altered.

With that said, I don't have a problem with him editing the photo either if that was allowed in the competition - it's his vision he is presenting, etc.

When I originally saw the image, I knew it was manipulated. But I don't know the contest rules, etc.

So what about black and white? That's like the ultimate in alteration of color. We don't see in black & white. We see in color. So any black and white photo is a pure distortion of reality.

I liked the winning photo as well, and it was pretty obvious that there was some type of post processing done. However, it is not like the photographer "pasted" in another victim or removed people from the scene. I have no problem with the edit.

The article make an interesting point about manipulating to heighten emotional response but also misses the point that PJ has never been about reality.

You can't dismiss photoshop over darkroom manipulation just because PS is easier to use. It is still altering the image.

More importantly PJ has never been about reality, only about the photographers view of events. Do you photograph the policeman hitting the demonstrator or the demonstrator punching the policeman. Whichever moment you capture you have just distorted reality by giving one moment more weight/value than another. Then of course there is the fact that even the way we take a photograph is a distortion - we choose what angle to put on events based on the direction we point our camera. As it says in the very old Guardian TV advert http://www.youtube.com​/watch?v=M3bfO1rE7Yg it is only when you get the whole picture that you can fully understand what's going on* - except that we never get the whole picture. We only gets the photographers chosen moment.

* For those readers easily distracted by examples, no, this post isn't about what a great well balanced paper the Guardian is.

I don't have the same "take" on the two photos. To me, the "original" looks like what you might get from an out-of-camera jpeg, and even though I wasn't there, I see what I would consider as too much saturation, especially in the red channel, coming out in the skin tones. I highly doubt that it's a "real" view of what the scene really looked like.

So, the photog, who was there, maybe considered the second "winning" version as more "real". I don't know, but I think the blogger is way off when he calls the "original" "more real".

This is an artificial argument. As Dan points out above, 'editorialing' goes on in every aspect of image capture - right down to the split second when the shutter button is pressed. Half a second later, and the image could tell an entirely different story. Even the way the camera is set up can determine the mood - high ISO, slow shutter speed, picture style, whatever.

The Photoshop v darkroom argument is spurious; there's always been an imperative to improve or manipulate quality. BUT NOT CONTENT.

The world of tv journalism is even more vexed on this issue. I was with the news crew who were first into the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps in South Beirut after the massacres in September 1982. Two rolls of 7240 film, about 25 minutes-worth.

Of which 1.50 made it to air.

That's editing. What was eliminated? The close-ups of butchered children; the image of the pregnant young woman with her belly ripped open and the foetus lying next to her; the old man with his eyes gouged out and amputated penis in his mouth. I think we can agree these are not images you'd want to watch on your Breakfast Show while munching your WheatyBangs. But did their removal from the final edit compromise the integrity of the coverage?

So, editing and image selection have always been with us. And what of "truth"? Ah, there's the rub; my truth may not be your truth. We can only acknowledge our own prejudices and try to mitigate them with professionalism.

I don't like either and personally would have processed that shot differently. I think a shot like that does need to look 'real' to have impact and neither of those do IMO.

The 'original' looks over-saturated, over sharpened and a bit 'overdone HDR-ish' and the final looks overly washed out with greenish skin tones.

But I agree the 'argument' is irrelevant. The photographer chose to process the shot in a particular way and IMO there is little sense of reality in one photograph of an event anyway. In fact the shot looks so one-sided and OTT as to be a poor photo-journalistic shot IMO. Personally I feel nothing. The babies look like dolls and could have died (I presume they are dead)for any number of reasons like 1000's of others across the 3rd world every day along with their mothers.

ejenner wrote in post #15635790
. . . In fact the shot looks so one-sided and OTT as to be a poor photo-journalistic shot IMO. Personally I feel nothing. The babies look like dolls and could have died (I presume they are dead)for any number of reasons like 1000's of others across the 3rd world every day along with their mothers.

Of course it's one-sided; a photographer can only be in one place at one time. That's the way photo-journalism works - informed selectivity, as in : "Yesterday, the IAF missile strike; there'll be funerals today". So you go cover them. And, since you're in Gaza, there's not much hope of doing a photo-essay on the man and his plane that released the missile.

And, as for OTT, there's a widespread ignorance in the West about the cultural context of mourning. In many places, there's no artificial barrier provided by the funeral parlour and the artistry of the mortician; such people express their grief publicly in a way that would make most of us uncomfortable.

Which brings me to the elephant in the room which many news organisations have not yet addressed - the difference in the way we portray death depending on the country concerned.

Somehow, it's ok to depict brutal death in the most graphic terms just because the people concerned have a black, brown or yellow complexion. Just try being similarly graphic in your coverage of 9/11, 7/7, or the IRA bomb attacks during their 30 year campaign. There'd be a firestorm of protest on the grounds of taste and the sensitivities of grieving families. There's a double standard there which I've seen regularly on news desks all around the developed world.

Given the circumstances, the question of manipulation extends well beyond retoning.

>>>"...The more salient question is whether or not the original would have won."

I think the following is a better way to pose the question: To what degree, if any, did the manipulation contribute to the win?

>>>"News has an ethical obligation to be truthful."

That's a mere platitude. A self-declared photojournalist could believe that he has an ethical obligation to present propaganda that he believes serves a higher truth.

>>>"If photojournalists, their organizations, and their industry care about veracity..."

No doubt, the newspeople who go into the business because they hope to "make a difference" will also proclaim that they are neutral and "care about veracity." The two are oftentimes incompatible.

In any case, given that we cannot agree upon the definition of "photojournalist," who's to say what photojournalists do and do not care about?

How do we know the "first published" is the original?

It could just as well be that the original file was "enhanced" by the publisher?

I like the retouched one my self.

Both images look pretty unreal to me. Neither would be what you'd see with your naked eye, both show clear evidence of being the product of a technological process.

I don't have a problem with color enhancements, sharpening, etc. That stuff is absolutely no different from the kinds of techniques used for decades in dark rooms. The fact of the matter is that there is nothing real created by the creation of a digital image. Unlike film, which actually records something on a physical medium, digital doesn't exist until we run the data through a conversion process, which is inherently divided from reality by a complex technical process.

There would be a serious problem if the image was photoshopped to do anything destructive, like removing an inconvenient person in the background or a plane in the sky. I think that sort of thing is where "truth" can in fact be harmed.