"When Reality Isn’t Dramatic Enough: Misrepresentation in a World Press and Pict

[Don Denton]

A couple of different but connected stories:

"When Reality Isn’t Dramatic Enough: Misrepresentation in a World Press and Picture of the Year Winning Photo"

"When an award-winning photojournalism photo has been toned to look like a movie poster, you are signaling to next year’s entrants that the bar has moved. Find the best retoucher you can, and heighten the drama as much as possible. We don’t care about factual statements. We care about visceral reaction and entertainment value. Make us feel something! Truth be damned."

This is blowing up all over the photo blog world and while I'm sure we'll vary on our opinions I think it's a subject that we do need to be discussing. Given the proliferation of social media tools (ie instagram) and various photo altering apps, how and where does photojournalism fit, what are the boundaries now and where will they be. At what point do we lose what credibility that we have. Where does our right as artists end and our responsibility to reality stop?

http://www.bagnewsnotes.com/2013/02/when-reality-isn’t-dramatic-enough-misrepresention-in-a-world-press-and-picture-of-the-year-winning-photo/

http://pdnpulse.com/2013/02/paolo-pellegrin-and-his-subject-at-odds-over-photograph.html

http://www.petapixel.com/2013/02/20/darkrooms-are-irrelevant-and-the-truth-matters/

[Ken Gigliotti]

 Regarding the gun photo , how many times does a photo not related to a project get shoe horned in because the photographer gets attached to it . It is usually the words that betray photos . Sometimes we put limits on photos that don't need to be there , sometimes we just like the photo too much , and the words not enough.
 Regarding the 2012 World Press funeral picture  , what would happen in any of the faces in the group were deemed more dramatic in pictures taken in  previous frames ? What if they were  individually cut and pasted  to complete a Last Supper type of photo ? What difference would it make if their expression was accurate , but just a frame earlier .( with eyes open , or not looking at the camera )
 It seems like we are rowing a small , beautifully crafted cedar canoe in Vancouver harbour and crossing shipping lanes with super tankers , container ships , fast pleasure craft and yachts . Commercial image making technology is moving so fast that our small numbers as consumers are being over whelmed and crowded out .
    We like photos from the Middle East but cannot justify  covering a local high school football game , or see the poverty or rapid changes in our own middle class culture   just blocks away from from our newspaper buildings . We see, every year small new groups of grass routes protest and say we don't understand them .The news releases are so poorly written.   
 Ok , ok , ok . We are talking about the things that don't make sense about news photography . We are not one personality , we represent many tribes . The still photographer , the pure shooter, the adrenaline junkie ,photo journalist , working stiff , risk taker , envelop pushers and extreme competitors .
    I believe most people are photographers first and learn journalism as they go. This is also where the conflict of age and experience intersect. The “new”  are always seeking an edge . This is an extreme sport , the best need to be noticed  to get those choice jobs or assignments. The ones that take the biggest risks  are rewarded more often than not.
   Contests are a  spring board , they are a way to separate ones self . There are many dynamics in play. It is the way it has always been . Pictures  in contests are a little like the Tour de France bike race , a risk is often rewarded and you don't have to pee in a bottle.
  There are issues of turning 2 dimensional images into three dimensional representations ,with curves , folds of cloth , there is limitations of tonal range , there is personal style , mood , story telling progression , how the eye travels  over the image . The Walmart picture printer is not the standard professionals aspire to.
   In some cases news photography is rough carpentry  with nails  and splinters , sometimes it is fine cabinet made with dowels and glue .
   Magnum founder Robert Capa's  1930's photo of the “falling  soldier”  at the moment of death on the battle field has always been controversial , some say a fake.
   The ethos of the Life Magazine photographers led many people into photography , it was a craft with very few rules . Since it is now taught in universities and colleges there has been a trend to codify practices . This is not a great thing for photography because it stifles innovation at a time when innovation is most needed . The degree of burning and dodging is still a point of contention , the tonal range and sensitivity is still expanding .
  Photographers as record keepers and artists will / should be debated till the last  newspaper is printed .
     Not long ago the only advances in photography dealt with faster lens , frame per second and higher ISO . Those days have past and  the next innovations will not be “in camera” but in post production .
  It seems that repetition ,competition and speed have created so many changes in news photography ,juiced up pictures , enhanced by designers  and page editors  doing what ever they like with photos for effects that have nothing to do with journalism are common.  At least let the person who shot the picture present the thing the way they saw it. Give the photographer credit ( until some picture agency grabs it) for having knowledge and giving  credibility to what he saw. If that has been  compromised then there is a price o pay.
    It may be that the age of journalism has passed , if it ever existed . Journalism , good , bad or indifferent may not be the answer now. The standards  of photographers have never been recognized in the media they have always exited  in. A sad fact . But ,writers have always marvelled at how photographs could say things they never could.  
  These are super juiced times ,  big and shiny  may trump everything .( big and shiny , look it up)

[Ken Gigliotti]

 The Crescent Rochester USA 2012 , gun photo award winner  photo by Paola Pellegrin  – The pain of getting noticed in a group of students while working with a prestigious  photography organization  in a limited time frame .
 The photog produced  award winning images during what must have been a pressurized , opportunity for a  student. Boy , this has the makings of a Hollywood ending or career  changing disaster.
  Give it a break , I honestly think that every photographer will break every rule and push every boundary at least once in their first 5 years . The game is rigged , it is the nature of a life lived leaning on two wheels. It is hard not to try too hard to please .
  People make mistakes and hopefully they can learn and return to the field of battle smarter and better .
The fact is that the photo project was worthy enough to garner major international awards and that one of the captions was wrong . A person in a photo  was wronged.  
  I know that photos speak for themselves but of course captions have to be added . Sometimes photos are taken in haste , the photo may not have been considered important at the time it was taken ,but gained importance as the collection began to take shape . Sometimes explanations need to be longer and everyone expects photogs to speak in website addresses and a few words. Seen but not heard.
  I knew a guy that went down to the Florida to work . He lived in a “safe area” but had to drive through a rough area to get to work . He was told to buy a hand gun and place it on his dash while he drove through those areas .There are places in the city he lived that posed health risks by simply stopping a red light. The visible gun and easy access to it was a visual deterrent. It seems this might be the case but I do not know.
  
The second award winning photo from a Syrian funeral. The people in this photo are offering us everything that they have .This could never be a local photo in Canada . This is an intense , genuine offering .
 This same business falls into the same cracks and these cracks often  do not revolve around dishonesty.  Finishing pictures ,  deal in fast changing , fast distributed images and it takes a while for the words to catch up. Sometimes there are no words , the  seer of these pictures just imagines the before and after each frame.
  
 It seems like we struggle with finishing photos . A photo in a newspaper , printed in colour , is still on newsprint the cheapest ink on the cheapest paper. When that photo is turned into B&W by the touch of an automatic setting ,  and reproduced , faces darken . Dark faces , darken even more . Dodging faces is normal .
   Put the photo on a website and the same photo looks like the way the photographer shot it.
  Take that same photo and send it to a news magazine  and the finished product looks brighter , sharper , and very cool .
   Put the same photo in a competition and it changes again . Subtle burning and dodging are the difference between winning and loosing . People care too much about their year end contribution to offer a straight print , or raw image . It is professional pride to compete with the best. A beauty pageant that leads to being noticed and  good jobs .
 
 The point is that pictures change . Every time I a printed a picture in a darkroom it looks different , every time I go back to a photo  it changes because I change . I defy anyone to take a raw image and crop it exactly the same , the next day , the next week or the next year. The same goes for burning and dodging or any normal working of an image, Those lines around a photo are subjective , just witness how a cropping stands up after an editor puts the photo  on a page.
 
 This is not a matter of honesty or dishonesty .We move quickly and decisively and move on . WE should all just take a breath work a bit slowwwwwer .Like that is going to happen. WE are daily , we make mistakes , daily.
  
  Regarding finishing , people talk about composition . There are two stages to composition , one is enacted at the time the photo is taken , and second  is in   the moments of finishing .Since news /sports photographers cannot control the subject , it's movement , the lighting , or expression , nor predict distance from camera when the key moment happens , the photo gets a second sober look . Like the senate , time slows down , we get a chance to think . Almost every newspaper photo needs cropping. The expectation of the news photo has got crazy , but we jump at submitted photos . Laziness in media  4.0 .I think that there are some who think it is easier for responsibly to fall on others.

We think in thirds but there are also ellipses , circles of interest , lights and darks , there is a harmony that needs to be extracted within the lights and darks as well as the natural motion of the image .This has become the danger zone . It is not dangerous because photographers are trying to fool the public , it is driven by necessity . If someone tries to deceive the public , it is rare , if other factors are in play then second chances are in order .

[Don Denton]

A thoughtful piece from Ken Jarecke on the issue:

"Caption mistakes are one thing. Anyone can make that kind of mistake. Personally, I’m not a big fan of captions. I want viewers to see the photograph and then go to the caption to enhance and add to their understanding of the image. This controversy is no longer about poor, misleading or “lifted” captions. This is now about a self-proclaimed “documentary” photographer who manipulates people and uses them as props to illustrate a story narrative he’s made up in his head.

I thought these issues had been worked out by now. You don’t use people for props. You don’t manipulate them into doing things they aren’t doing and you don’t ask them to pose for you and then pretend it’s a situation that you’ve happened upon. This is the 21st century and as journalists we’ve had these conversations countless times. Walker Evans shouldn’t have moved the furniture. Gene Smith shouldn’t have sandwiched negatives. The guy who’s name I don’t remember shouldn’t have removed the Coke can.

Were we not clear on this?"

- See more at: http://kennethjarecke.typepad.com/mostly_true/2013/02/just-make-it-happen.html

[Ken Gigliotti]

I see and respect  your point .
“This is now about a self-proclaimed “documentary” photographer who manipulates people and uses them as props to illustrate a story narrative he’s made up in his head.”

Creating natural looking , posed pictures has been raised to a high art  in current  newspaper journalism . This is not something I have very been good at . But those who are good at it are getting a lot of space on pages. This is relatively new . I don't know how these pretend casual pictures are accomplished . These are normal assignments  ,page editors prefer them . I am against using people as actors , but people of higher pay grades are not.


 I do not know the photographer , but this discussion is recurring . Judgements   are made  . This is not the priesthood or a courthouse .There is a theoretical and practical aspects to our job and huge cracks for people to fall into .
   Manipulation , people as props , this is common practice . People are used for scale , clutter for business pics , demonstrations can be made to look big or small depending on the story bias .
  This is in fact the world of documentary film and video , this is the world of television news , in fact it is the way of the news story . This is print and film/video journalism .
    TV shooters have told me , too many times to take for granted ,that they have been faking news for years . Video needs continuity , transition , a story to fallow from beginning to end.
    The old Life Magazine  print photo doc's started as story boards . All film and video doc's begin with planning a progression of shots , a story board .
   The news story is not simply about facts , that would be boring . Writers will  always tell you “we have to make it interesting” . There are degrees of  trickery . “Interesting” is code  , newspapers rely on controversy and facts . How could tabloid journalism exist . The biggest complaint about journalism is about  taking things out of context . Decades of daily complaints about how one aspect of a story is favoured over another . There has to be some truth to it.
  For photographers , we take photos , the frame is locked , it's content cannot  be changed in a fundamental way. Any project shows an automatic bias.
Newspaper journalism started over a hundred years ago with , Jazz journalism  , then progressed to Yellow , and Tab , and then to Responsible . It's principles are over one hundred years old . Tab vs Broadsheet , you have to wonder about our marching orders .
  I have openly questioned the weaknesses of the “news angle” , how stories are formulated from morning meetings  and carried out by journalists . I understand  the need for order but I have also seen the abuses , I have seen young reporters unable to speak against stories that they feel are off centre .
  Since everyone has been interviewed by a newspaper , the public sees the strings . Almost everyone has been on TV , the same is true. Why are bloggers in such high demand , same for Twitter . There is a rejection of managed, mainstream  news , single point of veiw stories.
   Fundamental change is needed in these areas .
 I do not fault the person involved in this controversy to any large degree , the game is rigged and unfair to those first stepping into it. I can see how mistakes are made , I am not without sin.
  Pictures and stories have repercussion , everyone involved can see that . Words are often the problem . For photography the fast changing technology is spooking the old, old horses. There is opportunities for the new colts to take advantage in the vacuum and to no ones surprise, it's limits (unknowable)  are being tested .  
   These are the things reporters should be talking about , they are building blocks to what we do every day .The power based relationship between editors and reporters prevents this conversation.  The Digital media has pushed photographers into reporting rolls , the speed of the internet and our ability to deliver news quickly is out pacing accurate information .
  I have been working a breaking news shift for several years now ,I and others in print and TV supply the web with news pictures. But what do you say , the words and conclusions and information are not available , so the words become vague and useless , the pictures are still real .