[Leica] Photoshopping for truth

[lrzeitlin at gmail.com (Lawrence Zeitlin)]

Tina writes:

"The original photograph showed three people.  True, with a longer lens, the

photographer could have shown only Obama, but that is not what happened.  An

editor decided to deliberately remove one person and replace them with

clones of the ocean.  That made the original photograph an illustration, not

a news photo.  Different lenses and different framing are legitimate.

 Removing or adding details is not."


Tina,

That's not exactly what my old Pulitzer Prize winning editor on the Boston
Globe during the early 50s would have said. Particularly your justification
of the use of different lenses and framing. He felt that the camera was the
reader's eyeball surrogate. A news photo should show exactly with the
newspaper reader would see if he or she was in the photographer's position.
Use of telephoto or wide angle lenses altered perspective and distorted the
spatial relationships of the scene. To his mind that was editorializing,
then regarded as an unforgivable sin in news reporting. For most of us the
point was moot since we used 4x5 Speed Graphics with basically one "normal"
lens. But even magazine photographers of the time used Rolliflexes with
their essentially "normal" lenses. Except for sports photography, few
photographers used telephoto lenses. If you wanted a bigger image, you just
moved closer. Images taken with wide angle lenses for added photographic
"punch" didn't appear in publications until the late 60s.


The issue of photographic truth is another can of philosophy entirely which
I shall pontificate about in another post.


Larry Z