Reuters withdrew nine hundred photographs by Adnan Hajj, a freelance Lebanese photographer from its database on Monday after a review of his work showed he had altered two images from the conflict between Israel and the armed group Hizbollah. Global Picture Editor Tom Szlukovenyi said the fact that two of the images by photographer Adnan Hajj had been Photoshopped [tm] undermined trust in all his work. "There is no graver breach of Reuters standards for our photographers than the deliberate manipulation of an image," Szlukovenyi said in a statement. This is old news now, and The blogs have long been all over this one.
I don't know why, but I just can't take it seriously. I find the plagiarism and photoshop stories uproariously funny. . .it's seeing the press take a beating. And then jump into auto-flagellate mode for a few weeks! While the press wear their hair shirt, the protracted hand-wringing begins on the left and the right. Was Hajj, like Jayson Blair, "sticking it to the man, " trying to jazz up some lackluster pictures, or letting his imagination run free and wild? Was he a mad prankster, having fun? Alas, probably not. He was a free-lancer and spec. photographer in an extremely competitive environment. He was in the right place and time to pick up some serious coin.
If I wrote news, or shot news pictures, I'd have to approach the news more as a raconteur than a retailer of facts. The truth never matters as much as The Story. In any case, it can all be true, whether it happened or not. If it's remotely plausible, it will happen sooner or later. By reporting on it early, you're not practicing the liar's craft; you're prescient.
You do have to wonder how many thousands of photoshop jobs we've seen in the news section over the years? Readers of All This Is That know we are not averse to a little photomanipulation ourselves.
This Hajj thing has me a little shaken 'though. I start wondering if some of my favorites have been manipulated.
---o0o---
2 comments:
The thing that bothers me most is how amateurish the photoshopping was. Looks like he just cut-and-pasted a segment of the original cloud image several times to make more cloud. At the very least, you should have to go through Photoshop class in photo journalism school....
Yeah! No wonder they found him out. Some of the jobs of his I saw replicated easily identifiable patterns and he didn't do a good job of smoothing dropins, and even had conflicting shadows, etc.
I saw an alleged P/S he did (Reuters says so far there were only two for sure) that looked like it had been done in MSPaint.
I didn't write about this--but I have to assume that the press photoshops photos--at the very least for things like color and gamma correction. Not to mention cropping, and resolution changes. In the case of photos, they need to make the half-tones, and in color printing the must need to make color layers (I think they're called separations). This stuff is probably done in Photoshop or another, higher end, program.
Hajj just took it all to the next level!
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