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A Short Jaunt Down the Slippery |
I HAVE long been an observer of the rapid changes that have occurred in the image processing industry. This article looks at the emergence of the digitally procured image, its development into the information age, and the current ethical problems associated with digital photography as it pertains to the news media. The birth date of the digital image dates back to a press release
issued by the Sony Corporation on August 24th, 1981. While the method of image capturing
for the last 100 years has always been through the use of silver-halides, now the
Sony Corporation has invented a new method that incorporated advances in capture,
storage, uses, and variety of applications. The first real field test of digital photography that took place was at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. A Canon RC 701 digital system was used by Yomiuri Shimbun to capture a colour image and transmit it back to Japan for the evening edition. Digital photography, however, is not just about advances in technology. It involves a whole set of ethical questions that challenge the very notion that photography acts as a document of truth, originality, or reality. What seems most prominent during the early days of digital photography
are the initial abuses and outrageous fakes that were created even by some very respected
publishers. As the first images used in newspapers were, of course, etchings made
by engravers, this left the truth in the hands of someone who was not a witness to
an event. Later on, with the use of image cropping, airbrush work, set-up or even
staged events, the validity of an image could come under question. Dating back to
the American Civil War, the photographer Mathew Brady (under contract to the Union
Army) and one of his photographers, Timothy O'Sullivan are said to have "moved
at least one dead body to compose a photograph." Even the Pulitzer prize winning
photograph by AP photographer, Joe Rosenthal was a re-staged event of the flag raising
on the island of Iwo Jima, which had first been captured by Marine photographer,
Louis Lowery days before. Photography itself has now been diverted from its sole responsibility of documentation of the truth (somewhat) to what is now termed "imagery enhancement" or digital correction as if there was something wrong with the raw image to begin with. There were three main corporations who pioneered this effort, Scitex (from Israel), Hell (German), and Crossfield (U.K.) who together revolutionized the Digital Pre-Press industry. In fact even today, staffers at National Geographic refer to any kind of digital manipulation as the verb to "scitex" (e.g. "Scitex that power-line outa dere"). Before these systems were invented, pre-press was a labour-intensive and extremely expensive vocation requiring years of training and apprenticeship. Now with the digital technology available, a competent operator can take an image from raw to a mode-correct finished product in one-tenth of the time. It would seem that all this technological wizardry would flash caution signs all down the information highway, but this is not the case. Moving something as grand as a pyramid in a photograph digitally almost seems innocent if you compare it to the old style method that would have taken a journeyman hours of stripping, airbrushing and hand re-touching. National Geographic featured this digitally altered pyramid in question, on the cover of their February 1982 issue, and they were embarrassed, to say the least. New York Newsday, for the front page of the February 16th, 1994 issue, created another groundbreaking example which showed Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan apparently skating in very close proximity to each other. This was a composite of two images shot some months before. Referring to this photograph, Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor of the Washington Post said in an interview "this paper had decided not to publish altered photographs showing imaginary events." Ethical newspaper photo editors uniformly reject the use of retouching,
airbrushing, and all other forms of unethical manipulation. I have been witness to
some of these manipulations, for example: the scanning of a photo off the section
front of the competing paper for use in one's own daily edition, the cutting and
pasting of a world-class athlete's headshot onto another person's uniformed body
for use as an inside poster. Another ongoing problem has to do with editors who would
prefer to scan art out of "stock books" rather than take the time to assign
a photographer to shoot original material
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