Category: Ethics

VALÉRIE BOYER is 47, a member of the French parliament and a divorced mother of three. She is tall, fashionable and, dare we say it, slim.

But she has also created a small furor here and abroad with her latest proposal: a draft law that would require all digitally altered photographs of people used in advertising be labeled as retouched.

I am a consultant on the redesign of the Web site of a company with local franchises across the United States. A franchisee in San Diego mentioned that posting a generic picture of an African-American customer could deter potential business. He has never had an African-American client nor does he anticipate one. His clientele is 70 percent white, 29 percent Hispanic and 1 percent Asian. Each local office will have a Web page and could have its own generic customer photo. May race be a factor in choosing it?

In your review of “Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth” you write, “Curtis thinks all manipulation is the same.” That he wants to lump all the F.S.A. photographers into one big pile and, in particular, he wants to prove that Walker Evans is guilty of manipulation.

JAMES CURTIS: My favorite example is Walker Evans moving furniture around inside the sharecroppers’ cabins in Hale County, Alabama. I was talking to Alan Trachtenberg [a professor of American history at Yale]. And Alan said, “Well, when your article on Evans came out, I was mad as hell.” And I said, “Well, what were you mad about?” And he said, “Well, what difference does it make if he moved furniture around inside the sharecroppers’ cabins?” And I said, “Because Evans has been regarded as the high apostle of documentary honesty, and he said he never did things like that.” And afterwards, Trachtenberg replied, “Oh hell, we all know he was a liar.”

Yes. The steer skull was my point of entry. But by the time I got around to the book, I decided I wanted to get past the steer skull very quickly, because that issue had already been debated so much. And yes, Arthur Rothstein moved that skull around, and he admitted as much. And Rothstein, if anything, except for “Fleeing a dust storm,” instead of trying to create his own sense of the world, was a pretty faithful servant of the FSA

Three different photographs. Three accusations of photo-fakery. Of the three, only one appeared to be an out-and-out fraud, the picture of the cattle and capitol. It appeared in The New York Times on Sunday, Aug. 9, 1936, with the caption: “Cattle Invade a State Capitol. A herd driven from the drought area contentedly grazes on the Capitol grounds at Bismarck, N. D.”

“These are sick, sick individuals,” Ridell added. “God bless them for saving our industry.”

It’s a sad commentary on the magazine industry when even the most attractive women in the world are retouched in Photoshop