Category: Ethics

Cognitive Dissonance and Photojournalism

Perfesser Kev:

In journalism justifications like that pop up frequently to argue why something considered unethical should be seen as okay “under the circumstances.” You’ve heard them: “magazines are different from newspapers” or “the cover is an advertisement” to explain away a breach of journalism ethics. Our ethics should determine our actions, of course. But there seems to be an unending stream of ways journalists justify letting their actions determine their ethics.

Digital image analysis verifies authenticity of Reuters photograph

Dr. Neal Krawetz:

Over the last 48 hours I have received nearly a dozen requests to voice an opinion on an alleged fake photo. The photo, by Reuters photographer Anis Mili, is described as “A rebel on crutches fires a rocket propelled grenade while fighting on the front line in Sirte September 24, 2011″. The photo, taken from right behind the RPG as it is launched, is truly amazing.

Bob Dylan’s Unoriginal Paintings

ape:

Seems that the Gagosian Gallery of Cariou v. Prince fame can’t stay away from artists using photography to make their art. This time it’s Bob Dylan who takes photographs, repaints them and then claims they are “firsthand depictions of people, street scenes, architecture and landscape.”

WikiLeaks Springs a Leak: Full Database of Diplomatic Cables Appears Online

Wired:

Unlike the cables that WikiLeaks has been publishing piecemeal since last fall, these cables are raw and unredacted, and contain the names of informants and suspected intelligence agents that were blacked out of the official releases. Der Freitag said the documents include the names of suspected agents in Israel, Jordan, Iran and Afghanistan, and noted that interested parties – such as the Iranian government or intelligence agencies – could have already discovered and decrypted the file to uncover the names of informants.

DIANE ARBUS: "Notes from the Margin of Spoiled Identity – The Art of Diane Arbus" (1988)

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American Suburb X:

The principal issue raised by the remarkable photographs of Diane Arbus seems not to be their remarkableness, which few would dispute, but their morality. The very potency of her images, their dangerous, disturbing allure, demands an almost instantaneous moral judgement on the part of the viewer. Her pictures call forth an immediate stance which, it would seem, just cannot remain equivocal, yet which in many cases is tinged with uneasy contradiction. To some, Arbus is seen as the prime exemplar of the fundamental baseness of the photographic act, that act which caters ineffably to the disinterested voyeur lurking in us all. Others laud her for her compassion and her humanity, finding in her work an empathy with a disadvantaged subject matter to rival that of Riis, or Hine, or any of the great photographic humanists.

AP kills photo altered by state-run North Korean news agency

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Poynter:

North Korea claimed that seven North Koreans are walking in a flooded street in this July 15 photo North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency took, which it provided to AP. In the photo, residents walk in knee-deep water, but photo experts suspect the photo of being retouched, citing the relatively dry clothes of the residents as evidence. [YONHAP]