Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2010/07/20

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Subject: [Leica] Altered Photo
From: shino at panix.com (Rei Shinozuka)
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2010 13:20:15 -0400
References: <AANLkTin8h0C9qYLdXaQaTpUY0zoOeVwIkB2Jn0wdoDLp@mail.gmail.com> <6.2.5.6.2.20100720115111.03547db0@med.cornell.edu>

I'm with Chris.  I've never worked in any part of journalism or 
related-field, but as a consumer, I do have certain (perhaps naive) 
expectations.

I think of a photograph captioned to be a representation of a particular 
time and place to be the visual equivalent of a quotation.  There's a 
limited number of acceptable manipulations: the quote can be snipped, 
superfluous words dropped (always indicated by ellipsis) and very minor 
semantically-equivalent substitutions made (demarcated by square brackets).

My personal complaint with the image in question is actually not so much 
the removal of the caddy, but the replacement with a background that 
wasn't there.  For example, if they replaced the entire background with 
white, I'd be more forgiving.  Or as Chris suggested, blurring and 
burning would be a better compromise.  To return to the quotation 
analogy, you can't justifiably combine different phrases from different 
sentences in a new order and represent the result as a single quotation.

Painting on a picture, or cutting and pasting a different background 
strikes me as over the line for any journalistic or documentary 
photography which purports to be an image of a specific subject at a 
specific point in time.

-rei

On 07/20/2010 11:56 AM, Chris Saganich wrote:
>
> Wherever the deep-pockets say.  I have to agree that removing a person 
> of some significance from the frame solely for aesthetic reasons is 
> just wrong.  I think blurring and burning him down a bit would have 
> sufficed and not got the guy into trouble.  The wholesale elimination, 
> the removal from existence, the complete denial of  the caddy's moment 
> is unjust IMHO.  Where to draw the line?  Always draw the line at 
> justice.
>
> Chris
>
> At 11:06 AM 7/20/2010, you wrote:
>> LUG:
>>
>> So where do you draw the line?
>>
>> http://pdnedu.blogs.com/pdn_pulse/2010/07/getty-photographer-fired-over-altered-golf-photo.html
>>  
>>
>>
>> <http://pdnedu.blogs.com/pdn_pulse/2010/07/getty-photographer-fired-over-altered-golf-photo.html>
>>  
>>
>> Tina
>>
>> -- 
>> Tina Manley, ASMP
>> www.tinamanley.com
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Leica Users Group.
>> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Leica Users Group.
> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information


In reply to: Message from images at comporium.net (Tina Manley) ([Leica] Altered Photo)
Message from chs2018 at med.cornell.edu (Chris Saganich) ([Leica] Altered Photo)