I’ve written many times about the ethics of news photography over the years, and most recently in a post World Press Photo sets Ethics Code which also mentioned the Reuter’s dictat that its photographers should only submit pictures that had been made in camera as jpegs. So I’ve been interested to see the ongoing discussion taking place particularly on-line over both these.
One contribution which I think is worth reading and touches on both of these is a post by Lewis Bush on his ‘Disphotic‘ blog, RAW Logic: On Reuters Change of Format. It makes several good points, not least that RAW files show the image before processing while jpegs are always subject to in-camera processing and thus inherently less verifiable. At least one of my friends is rather addicted to the kind of in-camera settings that make some of his images look as if they came from Instagram. Of course RAW files are also processed, with some cameras applying considerable sharpening, but certainly the processing on jpegs is more extreme and to some extent alterable by the photographer.
Bush also has some interesting thoughts about the motivation behind the decision by Reuters, which I leave you to read for yourself. A week earlier, he wrote another post,
World Press Photo and the Integrity of the Photographer which is again an interesting discussion, though I have some reservations. WPP is essentially a competition for press photography, and its main emphasis is on news photography. The rules for the competition I think reflect this and are an attempt to express in practical terms its code of ethics, which I think are something of an attempt to set down what is widely seen as appropriate for news photography (though perhaps less so in the UK than in many countries.)
Another post I found of interest was on the National Portrait Gallery annual and rather predictable Taylor Wessing Prize. It contains several things I wish I’d said.
I do wonder rather about the title of his blog, Disphotic; perhaps because of my terrible typing (King of the typo!) which made it first appear in this post as Sidphotic I can’t get away from connecting it with dyslexic, which is certainly unfair. But then I always have to explain >Re:PHOTO to everyone.