but then the n.y. times wouldn’t have
published his work within that gallery,
since their focus was on photography,
and specifically not photo-illustration.
(because photo-illustration can make
_any_ point, even one known to be false.)

but even further…

it wasn’t the fact that he didn’t “tell us”
what he was doing… not at all… it was
the fact that he said point blank he was
_not_ doing something which he _was_
indeed doing. so it wasn’t an error of
omission, but an error of commission.

-bowerbird

what we do online is not reading, it is SCREENING, agree. disagree? blog on my idea, pro or con?

Danny Bloom
Tufts 1971 in …Taiwan

Danny Bloom
Tufts 1971 in …Taiwan

So I’m a traditionalist, but I will also accept the *possibility* that a talented observer — writer or photographer — might choose to “go out of the way to distort things” in order to deliver a more faithful portrait of what he or she had seen. My rule about that is: if you’re doing that and you want me to keep trusting you, you’d better tell me what you’re doing.

I guess what I’m nagged about is what I criticized: the lack of disclosure. If Martins felt that the best way to represent the reality he observed was to doctor the images a certain way, I’m willing to consider that (though reasonably skeptical). Let him tell us what he did and make the argument for it and let us judge. We similarly accept the work of New Journalists who, we understand, may not be offering verbatim transcripts of reality. What’s important is that we know the terms of engagement.

It’s certainly true that nothing–not photos, not words, not pixels, not anything–can wholly reflect reality (to use the Times’ strained phrase), much as Borges said his words could never achieve the clarity and simultaneity of the Aleph.

Still, aren’t you nagged by something here? The fact that, as Pedro Meyer rightly emphasized to you, all writing and photography (and most other attempts at communication) involve distortion doesn’t mean that we have to go out of our way to distort things.

I’m a writer not a photographer. I certainly sculpt what I write–through style, wording, emphasis, shadings of character, the quotes that I use, etc. But I don’t add people, or shove in props, or lard on strange symmetries that accord with my aesthetic but weren’t there when I was doing my reporting.

That would be making things up–and it strikes me as the verbal version of the kind of digital manipulation Martins engaged in here.

Rob Neuwirth

I wrote the following in a StinkyJournalism blog post, 5/29/09 “In the world of many opinions and fights on the subject of what is ethical practice in news photo alterations, Mueller’s rule of thumb–call it Mueller’s Law– is a good news photography standard that StinkyJournalism can live by…He asks a question: Does the photographic technique mirror the function of human eye? If it doesn’t, then at least label it ‘illustration’ or disclose it in a caption for lack of a better alternative.”

http://www.stinkyjournalism.org/editordetail.php?id=334&keyword=national%20press%20photographers

Photographer says to me: “Alan, if 10 people look at my photographs and draw 10 different conclusions, I feel as though I’ve done my job.”

I replied: “Well, if 10 people read the caption I write for your picture and react the same way, I’m in deep trouble — especially with my editor, who will send the copy back to me with ‘WTF?’ scrawled across the top.” …

Photographs are often ambiguous. Without someone to spell out exactly what you’re seeing, images are Rorschach blots (10 people, 10 stories). I wonder if that makes the jump to Photoshop that much easier.

Pedro Meyer says: “We trust pictures because they’re pictures. That’s crazy.” It *is* crazy. It also may be why the whole “graven image” prohibition ranks #2 on the big Top Ten List. http://tr.im/rzh7