Ethics Matters

A Monthly Column in News Photographer magazine

Deni Elliott, Director, The Practical Ethics Center, University of Montana
Paul Martin Lester, Professor of Communications, California State University, Fullerton
(E-mail and Web page)

Manipulation: The Word We Love to Hate
An Investigation in Three Parts

One of our favorite quotations about photography comes from the Irish playwright, humorist, and philosopher, G. Bernard Shaw. "I would willingly exchange every single painting of Christ," Shaw once wrote, "for one snapshot."

Shaw's quote speaks to the once sacrosanct position of photography, as an art form that was trusted more, if not altogether respected more, than painting. Painters naturally add and subtract elements from a scene in order to create an interpretation of life on a two-dimensional canvas, but they do it with only brushes and paints. And although photographers can render a truer relationship between the thing photographed and the photograph itself, they cannot perform this act on their own--they must use a machine. For that reason, painting has traditionally been more respected than photography.

Manipulation, in other words, has always been expected with paintings. But manipulation was not a concept that applied to the public's initial and naive idea of photography. Therefore, any likeness of an historical figure that walked the Earth before the invention of photography was necessarily understood to be an artifact created by the mind of an artist for interpretive and inspirational, rather than for purely factual purposes. Such a rendition, no matter how closely it followed eyewitness accounts of the person rendered, could never be considered a total portrait of what that person was like in real life. Think of the mystery of DaVinci's "Mona Lisa" and what the formal portrait does and does not reveal. A snapshot, however, would show how she lived and appeared in an everyday setting. For Shaw, then, undeniable proof of Christ's existence as a man could never come from paintings--proof could only come from a simple photograph that he believed to be true and not manipulated.

But photography from its publicly announced birth year of 1839 has always been and always will be a matter of artistic and craft-oriented interpretation, or manipulation, as it were.

Manipulation, as such, is not an evil word. But it has become one. A look in a dictionary reveals that the first definition for "manipulate" is benign: "to operate, use, or handle something." But the third and fourth definitions are more interesting and appropriate for this discussion: "to control or influence somebody or something in an ingenious or devious way" and "to change or present something in a way that is false, but personally advantageous." Obviously, we all manipulate a camera and computer software in ways that cause others to see what we've seen, but when manipulation is due to deviousness, creates a false impression, or achieves some sort of personal gain, ethical questions ensue.

Here are some of the ways pictures are commonly manipulated that we are concerned with:

  • Combining images: taking parts of two or more photographs to create a third. What has been called by some as "doing a Walski";
  • Copycatting: taking pictures of a scene that another photographer set-up. Tony Overman, staff photographer for The (Olympia, Washington) Olympian described for the NPPA-L listserv a situation in which a photographer during a memorial service for a college basketball player who had died changed the scene for a better composition. Overman wrote, "There were two large photos (poster size) of the young man set up on each side of the podium. Following the memorial service, some friends of the young man gathered to the side of the stage to hug and comfort each other. The photos were facing forward (toward the audience, away from the friends). A photographer from another newspaper walked up, turned the photo 90-degrees so it was behind the hugging friends, and now facing the photographer. Soon, nearly all of the photographers covering the event were shooting the scene. Many of them may not have seen the other photographer manipulate the situation. But I did, so I didn't shoot the set-up situation."
  • Cropping: removing the outside edges of prints. Probably the most famous example is Sen. Joseph McCarthy's implication that Secretary of the Army Robert T. Stevens had a close relationship with an enlisted man by omitting a third man in the photograph through cropping;
  • Cutline/headline: changing the content of an image with words. For example, when Time and Newsweek magazines both used the famous police mug shot of OJ Simpson, but with vastly different headlines ("An American Tragedy" vs. "Trail of Blood");
  • Obstructing: preventing photographers from doing their job. TC Baker of the Victoria (Texas) Advocate reported that government officials prevented him from viewing the public removal of bodies of victims.
  • Re-enactments: recreating an event that happened in the past. ABC's "World News Tonight" aired a re-enacted segment with actors depicting Felix Bloch, a U.S. diplomat under investigation for spying, handing a briefcase filled with secrets to an enemy agent;
    Stage management: arranging objects or persons for the camera by the subject (as with President Bush's photo-op aboard the USS Lincoln) or by the photographer (writing "Yeah Eckerd" on the bottom of a fan's foot in order to enliven a sports feature picture as was done by Norman Zeisloft); and
  • Touch-ups and/or touch-outs: altering, adding, or removing elements from a picture. A Day in the Life of Australia and California cover pictures come to mind.

    Just as important as reciting manipulation examples is a discussion on the reasons why images get manipulated. Some of these we have heard include:

  • Demonstration: showing readers and/or viewers what technology can do. The journal Media Ethics showed how a person peacefully listening to music could be turned into a gun-toting revolutionary through PhotoShop software;
  • Marketing, advertising, personal, political, and/or editorial decisions: having reasons based on aesthetic, commercial, or other unknown considerations;
  • Pressures: Contests, competitions, and adverse situations sometimes cloud reasonable judgments. Some feel that Brian Walski's manipulation was caused by lack of sleep while covering the war in Iraq;
  • Reader/viewer request: Many times readers and viewers have their own ideas about what and how stories should be covered. For example, readers of The (Portland, Oregon) Oregonian complained bitterly after a large photograph on the front page showed an Iraqi father crying over the death of family members that outplayed a story of Pvt. Jessica Lynch's rescue; and
  • Subject request: Photo-op. Sometimes it is simply easier and expedient to go along with a subject's idea of what should be documented.

    However, having reasons for manipulating is not the same as having moral justification for doing so. In the next two columns we will explore the concept of manipulation through historical and current examples. We will conclude in the third column with ways to think positively about the word, "manipulation." Journalists often manipulate subjects and images to present the news; and they do so ethically--in a way that enhances journalistic credibility despite an ever-growing technically sophisticated public.

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