I don’t often find the time to sit and read a serious newspaper during the week. Normally I’ll just hear the news on the radio, usually while I’m eating, and perhaps skim through a few articles on the web, mainly ones that people have recommended on Facebook. And often, while I’m travelling up to Waterloo or Victoria on my way to take pictures I’ll take a quick glance through The Metro or relax with the Evening Standard later on my way home.
But yesterday I had to wait around at The Print Space while some of the pictures for my gardens show (more later) were being printed, and after leafing through a copy or two of Vice Magazine I picked up The Guardian and found a piece by Roger Tooth, the paper’s head of photography on picture manipulation and trust in news imagery.
You won’t be surprised to find that he’s against it – manipulation that is – at least so far as news photography is concerned, but it’s actually a very clear and sensible piece on the subject. Like me he comes down to a very simple principle, but one that would be hard to define in detail:
“cropping and toning basically anything that might have been done in a darkroom is OK, but the moving of pixels or “cutting and pasting” is forbidden”
and he continues by saying that “We have to trust our photographers and the agencies we deal with“. In the end it does have to come down to trust and the integrity of the photographers concerned. This is one reason why it is so important that photographs are properly attributed, not just to an agency (Getty or Hulton or AP never took a photograph) but to an individual. Of course attribution is one of our moral rights, though unfortunately at the time of the last copyright act the government let itself be lobbied by the newspapers and magazines into denying it to photographers. (The Guardian probably tries more than most, but it would be nice to see closer to 100% attribution there.)
Of course many if not most of the pictures published by The Guardian and all the other newspapers will have had pixels moved, and also other things done to them that would have been difficult or impossible in the darkroom. We routinely use tools to remove dust spots that clone pixels from one part of an image to another, and make complex adjustments to exposure, contrast, colour balance et al which were just not possible in those dim days of BD (before digital.) And back in BD I used to teach students how it was possible to combine negatives and many other tricks.
It really does come down to intention. To show the viewer what I saw as clearly as I can and as honestly as I can. What I do at the computer or in the darkroom is a continuation of what I do at the scene.
Tooth also makes the fine and sensible point that what is acceptable depends on the usage of a picture. Some things that would not be acceptable in a news photograph would be fine when making a portrait for the arts pages. There are still limits, but they are – at least arguably – in rather different places.
Who Killed Smiley Culture – protest marchers at Vauxhall
I did get time to read the Guardian at the weekend, although it was late on Sunday before I got around to reading Saturday’s news. I was pleased to see this picture (properly attributed) illustrating a feature about Smiley Culture after the news leaked out that the police who were present when he died and whose actions quite probably led to his death are not to face prosecution.
I thought immediately of the many other cases of suspicious deaths at the hands of police, where investigations have failed to come up with satisfactory explanations and where no charges have been made. Since 2007 the number of such deaths in the London area has roughly doubled – there are now around 30 a year. Smiley Culture has made the papers – and so for different reasons did the shooting of Mark Duggan and the killing of Ian Tomlinson, but most cases get little publicity.
Marcia and Samantha, sisters of Sean Rigg killed in Brixton Police station in August 2008 attend a memorial vigil for Ian Tomlinson in December 2009
Of course not all the deaths are down to police action. But far too many mainly black and healthy young men die, and few if any police are ever brought to account. ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ remains a good question, and the answer for the UK is that nobody is really watching the watchmen, or perhaps more accurately that we have a complex system set up including complaints procedures, the IPCC (more police) and courts which work together to ensure that there is no justice. We should not be surprised when sometimes there is no peace.
