Survival International, the organisation that released the pictures along with Funai, conceded yesterday that Funai had known about this nomadic tribe for around two decades. It defended the disturbance of the tribe saying that, since the images had been released, it had forced neighbouring Peru to re-examine its logging policy in the border area where the tribe lives, as a result of the international media attention
Check it out here.
“An absolutely disgusting photo,” said Darlene Tye, a transplant from California who is especially sensitive to how Southerners are depicted in the media. The missing teeth and what she described as unkempt attire reinforced a stereotype about people from the South, she said.
Valerie Cox objected to the photo for other reasons. After attending the concert with friends, she went to Jacksonville.com and was disappointed to find only five photos, and nothing like she expected.
“I was shocked to see the main photo representing the festivities was of an older African-American man who was missing most of his teeth,” she said. “There were thousands of other people in attendance who better represented the crowd. As an African-American, myself, I feel insulted,” Cox said.
Check it out here.
It turns out this photo of Tiger Woods in the Washington Post, which Photoshop Disasters fingered for being a doctored image, is actually not a photo editor’s bungled work
Check it out here.
Aren’t newspapers supposed to not do things like this? (I mean real newspapers, not National Inquirer or the British tabloids.) Isn’t there some sort of oath of journalistical ethics that they have to swear or something?
Check it out here.
A photo printed on the front cover of the Philadelphia Daily News is causing a stir.
The cover shows Jocelyn Kirsch, the “Bonnie” in the Philadelphia “Bonnie and Clyde” identity-theft ring, lounging in a bathing suit.
However, the photo also shows a house-detention bracelet on Kirsch’s leg that was edited into the photo. In the original photo, Kirsch never wore an ankle bracelet.
Check it out here.
A Chinese magazine has been shut down for printing pictures of scantily clad women posing in rubble for a special report on the country’s devastating earthquake, officials said on Wednesday.
The New Travel Weekly, a small lifestyle magazine, ran photos of sultry models in their underwear amid the debris in an issue that hit the stands on Monday – the first of three days of national mourning.
Check it out here.
A Soviet soldier heroically waves the red flag, the hammer and sickle billow above the Reichstag. Yevgeny Khaldei photographed one of the iconic images of the 20th century. But the legendary image was manipulated to conceal the fact that the Soviet soldiers on the roof had been looting. An exhibition of Khaldei’s work opens in Berlin this week.
Check it out here.
Pascal Dangin is the premier retoucher of fashion photographs. Art directors and admen call him when they want someone who looks less than great to look great, someone who looks great to look amazing, or someone who looks amazing already—whether by dint of DNA or M·A·C—to look, as is the mode, superhuman. (Christy Turlington, for the record, needs the least help.) In the March issue of Vogue Dangin tweaked a hundred and forty-four images: a hundred and seven advertisements (Estée Lauder, Gucci, Dior, etc.), thirty-six fashion pictures, and the cover, featuring Drew Barrymore.
The photo op.
Sen. Hillary Clinton had another one Wednesday. They’re usually staged before 1 or 2 p.m. to give crews time to edit the film and prepare their stories for the dinnertime news.
What TV viewers eventually saw was Clinton at a South Bend, Ind., gas pump with high prices. (See how she’s perfectly positioned so you can also see the prices? No accident. Although, truth be told, $3.75 a gallon looks pretty good to many Californians).
Clinton had along as a human prop commuter Jason Wilfing, allegedly on his way to work at a sheet metal factory. A real normal guy, no doubt, recruited by a Clinton advance worker for 12 of his 15 minutes of fame.
Check it out here.
Which brings us to the reason for this piece. Recent reports of overzealous edge-burning and the removal of extraneous limbs in backgrounds caused the editors of Sports Shooter to put out a call for opinions. Here’s mine: I think that directing the reader’s eye “in the moment”, like Cartier-Bresson, is always preferable to doing it after the fact in the darkroom, like Smith.
So, the “burn rule” as I see it is: The more you screw with it the more it becomes about you. In the worst cases it can be a downright lie. Photojournalists who use technology after the moment to “polish” a moment usually end up having a column written about them.
Check it out here.
The bottom line is this, if you are presenting work as the truth when in reality, it is not; you have only yourself to blame. Former Photojournalism sequence chair at Western Kentucky Mike Morse said it best, “you are either in the truth business… or you are in the entertainment business.”
Check it out here.
Resynthesizer is a very cool GIMP plugin I have been playing with for a few days. It can be used for some “magic” effects: create seamless backgrounds, transfer textures from one image to another and remove objects from images.
Check it out here.
There is also a gray area about what is ethical and what isn’t. There are the biggies that are fundamental–like cloning someone/something in or out of your frame. But to me the big part of ethics has to do with intention and misleading. Statements like “If I can do it in a darkroom, it’s okay” or “This is what the scene looked like to me” aren’t good enough reasons. I’ve seen what used to be done in a darkroom —and you can do some pretty drastic things.
This is why for me it comes down to the intent of the photographer, and whether or not it misleads the reader.
The Photojournalist Society of China (CPS) has stripped a photographer of a top award given for his picture of a vet vaccinating pigeons in front of Sophia Cathedral in Harbin, saying it was a fake, Beijing Youth Daily reported on Friday.
Check it out here.
Veteran Journalists Confess To Directing Photos. March 19, 2008.
Li Zhencheng graduated in 1963 from the Department of Photography of the Changchun Academy of Cinematography and later became a photojournalist at Heilongjiang Daily News. In the 1980’s, he went to teach at the Department of Journalism at the China People’s Police University. As a professional photojournalist, he had taken and preserved a large number of Cultural Revolution-era photos with the unique characteristics of those times.
On March 7, Li posted a photograph titled: Yet Another High Quality Well on his personal blog. He stated in very clear terms that this photograph had been directed and modified 35 years ago. “From the viewpoint of composition and lighting, this photo is quite perfect. In reality, there are many places in which modifications and forgery occurred. Back in those days, I was all for reasonably organization and modification. I advocated direction and alteration without giving any hints.” Li challenged his blog visitors to detect the flaws.
Check it out here.
When the news emerged this week that Margaret Seltzer had fabricated her gang memoir, “Love and Consequences,” under the pseudonym Margaret B. Jones, many in the publishing industry and beyond thought: Here we go again.
The most immediate examples that came to mind were, of course, James Frey, the author of the best-selling “Million Little Pieces,” in which he embellished details of his experiences as a drug addict, and J T LeRoy, the novelist thought to be a young West Virginia male prostitute who was actually the fictive alter ego of Laura Albert, a woman now living in San Francisco.
Check it out here.
Heh–in the vein of sites like AwfulPlasticSurgery.com, now we’ve got the Photoshop Disasters blog–chock full of image manipulation mishaps
Check it out here.
