Re: [Leica] fired for photoshopping

[Martin Howard <mvhoward@mac.com>]

Jerry Lehrer wrote:

> Martin
>
> Now you are acting as an apologist for one of your own kind.
>
> He didn't "accidentally" send the altered pic. And the editor at
> the other end, probably said. "This will wow them!  Print it and
> trash the other two", not knowing that it was a composite.

Jerry, maybe you should ease off on the coffee, and climb down from 
your moral hobbyhorse that you seem to be gallopping around your La 
Jolla paddock.

I'm not acting as an apologist for anyone.  If you'd taken the care to 
actually read and think about what I wrote, you'd recognize this.  One 
rather obvious clue lies in the way in which I prefixed the 
hypothetical scenarios with the expression "what if".  I am pointing 
out that the simple, comforting, quick-and-easy solution to many 
problems in complex, socially organized technical systems very rarely 
does anything to address the problems.  What it does do is buy people a 
measure of satisfaction.

Consider the Challenger accident.  The easy solution would have been to 
fire whomever was responsible for the launch decision.  That would have 
done *nothing* to solve the systemic problem of a gradual erosion of 
safety standards that was taking place within NASA at the time.  (The 
Human Error research literature is filled with examples of this, and 
I'll be happy to provide references should you wish to read more about 
them.)

I agree -- the photographer does not appear to have sent it 
unknowingly.  He appears to have suffered (or claims to -- we only have 
his word for it -- but it seems reasonable) a lapse of judgement.  
That, however, is not my point.

My point is that technology has pushed us to a point where the digital 
manipulation of images, the pressures on photographers and news 
organizations to get and publish "selling" images, and the ability to 
quickly get images from all around the world, means that there are 
built-in vunerabilities to this kind of error.

My point is that -- in the hypothetical case I presented -- even in the 
absense of intent, this sort of thing can easily happen.  And that 
current systems are vunerable to these kinds of errors, because there 
are few mechanisms in place to catch them.

I think that it's probably just a matter of time.  Either newspapers 
and other media rethink their way of handling images and confirming 
their accuracy (perhaps aided by technology -- watermarking, or digital 
camera signatures) or we are likely to see many more of these incidents 
take place.

That is not an apology or an excuse or an attempt to validate the 
photographer's actions.  It's an attempt to point out that the world is 
not black-and-white, that complex socio-technical systems provide 
unexpected (by their designers) opportunities for errors to be 
manifested, and that the traditional "scapegoat" approach to problem 
solving does little to address those embedded vunerabilities.  To me, 
this incident raises those larger issues, and is not as cut-and-dry as 
it may appear at first glance.

Oh, and assuming that you've actually read this far: explain to me in 
which way the photographer was "one of my own kind".  I'm not a top 
notch professional photographer working for a respected newspaper 
covering a war, and I'm guessing that Mr Walski doesn't have a PhD in 
Human-Computer Interaction and work with the design and evaluation of 
complex socio-technical industrial systems.  Off list, if you please.

M.

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