Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/11/06

[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]

Subject: RE: [Leica] Journalism, altered photo's, and other ethical debates
From: Tim Atherton <tim@KairosPhoto.com>
Date: Thu, 06 Nov 2003 19:05:58 -0700

> Tina,
> I have to admit that the standards in N. Carolina for journalism are way
> too high.  The image of the firefighter with the background burned out
> is very borderline, but what disappeared was a very out of focus
> background that contributed nothing to my understanding of the image.
> The others are truly not enough different to matter.

In the recent discussion along these lines on the NPPA-L I mentioned how
(highly respected) war photographer Don McCullin often quite dramatically
dodged and burned his skies, and by these standards a large proportion of
his images would be dismissed. Someone else responded that:

"There is a scene in /War Photographer/ where James Nachtwey is
discussing with someone the sky in a print he is having done, they go
back and make the sky darker at least three times.  No one said anything
about this because it was film and it is common darkroom practice.  If
they showed them doing the same thing in Photoshop I bet people would have
been
up-in-arms over it."

to which the response of one person (who writes a column on these matter)
was basically Nachtwey would be okay only as long as any dodging or burning
of the sky objectively and accurately reflected the sky as it was on the day
he took the picture, that the print should "reflect the scene as he
objectively saw it with his analog eyeballs". Basically, anything beyond
that was seen as manipulation and misleading the viewer...

Quite frankly it's baloney and nothing more than a sort of politically
correct or puritan fundamentalist approach to photojournalism


tim

- --
To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html

Replies: Reply from "Rob Appleby" <rob@robertappleby.com> (Re: [Leica] Journalism, altered photo's, and other ethical debates)
Reply from robertmeier@usjet.net (Re: [Leica] Journalism, altered photo's, and other ethical debates)