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NYT article addresses photography and war

Monday, January 4th, 2010 | News | No Comments

Read the full article here:

It Was All Started by a Mouse (Part 1)

The following is an excerpt of the article wherein Photographer Ben Curtis is interviewed by ERROL MORRIS.

In this section Ben Curtis describes how Adobe is working to create a way for PhotoShop to track all changes made to a photograph.  Here he talks about what that means and his perspective on the subject within the context of accuracy and the relevance of a photo’s caption.

BEN CURTIS: I don’t, but it was after the Reuters incident. I read the Reuters website after that, and there was a lot of handwringing and reevaluation of their procedures. After the war, I read that Reuters was working with Adobe on some software component for Photoshop that would keep a record of all the changes that had been made in Photoshop, so that editors could see exactly what had been done to an image. It would aid in preventing manipulation of photographs. I found that quite interesting from a technical perspective, and I could see how such thing could be useful in the work flow of maintaining accuracy of images. This was one of the things that was in my head when I was writing the “in defense of captions” post — while that’s useful or could be useful, a technical solution alone is never going to solve the problem of accuracy in the media. You could take a photographer’s image straight from the camera, not even processed with Photoshop, put it on the wire, and it’s the caption that provides the accuracy for that picture. The caption is the place where it’s easy to mislead the reader. [I have written about this in my essay "Photography as a Weapon."] The caption is the thing that provides accurate context. And without an accurate context or with a misleading context, you can completely distort the meaning of an image. At the end of the day it comes back to old-fashioned ethics. You have to trust your people on the ground and you have to drill into them the ethical standards that your organization has. I remember the day after the Reuters incident I instructed a Lebanese photographer —

Tags: ethics, Photography