advertisement

Photo ethics now more important than ever

One day a long time ago, a woman stormed into the newsroom of the small northwestern Illinois daily where I worked, her somewhat embarrassed pre-teen son in tow. The boy had been involved in a Little League play the previous day that our photographer had happened to capture a picture of, and we had published it as a human interest photo in that day’s newspaper.

Our initial fear was that we had misidentified the youth or misspelled his name in the caption, but the source of this mother’s ire was nothing so benign. Her complaint was that we must have doctored the photograph, which clearly showed a ball in mid-air as her son waited to catch it and an opposing player slid into second base. We did this, she contended, because the opponent had been called safe when everyone at the game knew he was really out and we must have wanted to support the umpire.

Our photographer tried to politely reassure the woman that he had no interest in the controversy of that play. He was merely trying to take a nice picture of some local kids having fun playing baseball on a lazy summer day. The mother would have none of it. She could not be dissuaded until the photographer took her to his darkroom, put the original negative on a light table and gave her a magnifying eyepiece with which to inspect the picture herself.

This story contains a wealth of themes, but a central one involves the ethics of manipulating photographs. Ironically, while it might have been possible under some circumstances elsewhere, the professional photographers in our small newsroom didn’t have the capability in the late 1970s to put a baseball in a picture where there was none originally or to move the ball from one location in the image to another. Today, however, any middle schooler could modify a picture taken with a telephone to show a second baseman eating a baseball like an apple and hide the distortion so well that anyone but a trained expert would be waiting to see him spit out the seeds.

Photography ethics, in short, have always been important; they’re more important now than ever.

I was reminded of this story as I sat through training intended to help our entire staff become proficient in the use of everyday technology so that we can supplement the work of our photogrphay specialists and let them concentrate on the most difficult and critical assignments. But the issue affects us even outside our own staffs. The news blogger Jim Romenesko recently reported on an Indiana TV station that published a viewer-submitted photo of a local storm into which a funnel cloud had been inserted — along with, inconspicuously, images of a UFO and of Bigfoot.

Aside from cropping and routine color correction, any sort of image manipulation has always been strictly forbidden at the Daily Herald, as at most newspapers, with exceptions permitted only in rare circumstances and then only with a clear explanation to readers. It will continue to be, but as photography director Jeff Knox pointed out, that’s going to require greater scrutiny of images we solicit or receive from the public. “You’ve got to at least give them a once-over to make sure everything’s legit,” Knox says.

And we will. So, if one of our staff happens to capture your son or daughter tagging out an opponent at second base, rest assured that the ball actually was wherever the photograph shows it being. We expect that will be true of any reader-submitted photograph we may publish, too, but we also know that assuring that is going to require considerably more attention and care than it used to.

Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is an assistant managing editor at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

Article Comments
Guidelines: Keep it civil and on topic; no profanity, vulgarity, slurs or personal attacks. People who harass others or joke about tragedies will be blocked. If a comment violates these standards or our terms of service, click the "flag" link in the lower-right corner of the comment box. To find our more, read our FAQ.