Ethical concerns about multimedia visual repording
(Note: These comments are included in Newsphotographer magazine, September, 2009, pages 28-29.)
Don Winslow, editor of News Photographer magazine, wrote me and other professors stating, he would like to have “… quotes from photojournalism college professors about what they think are the most pressing ethical concerns facing multimedia photojournalism and online visual reporting these days.”
I have thought about this very issue often. As print photojournalists have embraced, or have been forced to embrace, multimedia as a way of telling a story, many have ethical concerns. Most print photojournalists would prefer to be completely unnoticed as they go about their work and in a perfect world so would TV photojournalists. Often the best moments in pictures come when the subject is ignoring the camera and photographer. For decades now, still photo equipment has been relatively unobtrusive.
The major difference between traditional photojournalism and multimedia is the addition of sound and motion. And that is a huge difference. There is no doubt that sound can be a super additive catalyst in making a story even more compelling. Pictures have the capacity to create emotion and sound can add another layer of emotion. We have often seen still pictures with synchronized comments by the photographer, which helps frame the interpretation of the pictures. Motion can help explain detail where movement is important.
So what is the problem? From a still photographer’s perspective, recording sound ratchets up the level of intrusiveness. We don’t have to be recording engineers to know that the closer the microphone is to the source, the better the signal to noise ratio. Frequently, this involves putting a wireless microphone on the subject and running the cable inside the shirt or blouse of the subject.
Shooting video has the potential to be even more intrusive. Now the photographer has to worry about screen direction and attempting to find repetitive action that one can edit into a matched action sequence. There may be multiple changes of tripod setups for different views. Photographers can no longer be as unobtrusive as they might wish.
Another source of conflict is the real or perceived differences in standard newsgathering practices between TV stations and traditional print news organizations. A reporter and photographer from a station in my town arrived late to an event. While there had been a large crowd earlier, most had gone home. The reporter and photographer totally manipulated the scene by asking remaining participants to gather together so the crowd would look bigger in the shot. Additionally, the participants were asked to recreate, for the TV camera, what they had been doing earlier. One of my students was in the crowd and she brought up the situation for class discussion. Only two students, from a class of 50, thought that the TV reporter and photographer had acted ethically. To be fair, this same form of manipulation has occurred with area newspaper photographers as well. The NPPA code of ethics states, ”While photographing subjects do not intentionally contribute to, alter, or seek to alter or influence events.” This is not a practice that TV or print photographers should engage in.
But the mere presence of a TV reporter can be more intrusive than a print reporter and photographer reporting on the same situation. This is primarily due to the TV crew’s attempt at presenting the reporter as “on the scene” and on top of bringing the news to the viewing audience. More than any other news format, TV injects the reporter into the visual coverage of the story. When print photographers move into multimedia, they often let the subject tell their own story albeit with help from editing and sequencing from the photographer. This form of story telling can be more interesting and engaging than the average talking head reporter telling us what is happening. However, masters of the TV narrative story such as Bob Dotson or Boyd Huppert can make us forget the talking head.
When I was refreshing my video skill, I shot a video of a bicycle being assembled at a high-end custom shop. I took the edited video to my friend Steve Sweitzer, former NPPA president, and braced for a brutal critique. You only get better by taking criticism from someone who has been there, done that, and excelled. One of his many criticisms was the loud radio playing in the background. It really detracted from the sound I wanted in the video and when I made edits for the picture, I made a jump cut in the song audio. Sweitzer made the point that you need clear audio for your pictures and I didn’t have it due to the radio. “You mean I should have turned the radio down or off,” I said.
“Yes, under certain circumstances” Sweitzer replied. “Ask yourself what the story is about, if the radio’s part of the story, by all means, leave it in but if it’s just a distraction from the sound you need to tell the story, in this case the sound of the bike chain as it spins through the gears, you might have to exercise some control over the background noise; maybe use a lavalier microphone rather than the stereo microphone on the camera. Sometimes you have to ask a reporter to quit talking or shut a window to eliminate the lawn mower noise outside.” Sweitzer’s practical test is to ask himself if he had to explain to a room full of viewers what he had done, would they believe he had behaved unethically or in some way created a visual lie. That’s a good test.
Print photojournalists who are exploring unfamiliar technologies are just not used to new variables that may affect the story. It makes them ethically nervous. There are real differences between print and television on what is acceptable in terms of control of the scene, intrusiveness and asking subjects to recreate actions for the camera. According to Steve Sweitzer, “Most TV photographers, but not all, would agree that it is unethical for someone to ‘recreate’ actions.”
There is some acceptable middle ground. There is no doubt that one has to be careful about gathering good sound that is good enough to augment a visual story. This might mean asking the subject to move to a quieter location for an interview. Is that intrusive? Yes, but it may be necessary to have usable sound. You have to use your own judgment in the field. If you feel you are doing something that makes you uncomfortable or might put the veracity of the story in jeopardy, you should discuss it with your editor. If a photographer makes some intervention in the field, it should be explained in a brief note on the web site. In my situation, the note might say, “In order for you to better hear conversation of the employees in the bicycle shop, we asked that the radio playing loudly in the background be turned off.”
Print and broadcast practices come from the history and convention of different story forms.
At some level there is inherent manipulation of reality in every act of a photographer in both print and broadcast beginning with making the appointment to shoot the story. Many variables come to play when the shutter is pressed on either a still camera or a video one. Lens selection and viewpoint, editing, sequencing and timing of pictures are but a few of the decisions that we know may have an effect on the meaning of the story in the viewer’s mind.
All photographers could work at being better at anticipating behavior and being at the right place for the shot you need without any direction of the subject. If possible ask what the subject is planning to do when you first meet. This will help you plan shots in an unobtrusive manner.
All concerns about the technology and processes of multimedia story telling should be openly discussed in the newsroom. Would you add music to the soundtrack of a news story? No. But what if the story was a feature story? Each news organization should arrive at policies that guide reporters and photographers in the field. Ethical concerns make us think about what we ought to be doing in seeking the “truth” of a story.
And after all, what is “truth?”
Images
An artist creates a magazine cover with an iPhone
An iPhone and a $5 app for the iPhone was used to create a New Yorker cover. Play the video. It’s amazing. Here is the story ( http://bit.ly/XWjZM ).
Too much Photoshop?
by James W. Brown
I am glad to see a new trend toward reality in fashion photography reported in the New York Times ( http://bit.ly/17NO11 ). Many magazine covers have been over-retouched for decades.
Has any portrait studio picture of a person actually looked like the person? I think that most mothers could recognize their children in portraits but few others could. Portrait photographers use large, broad light sources to illuminate their subjects. We call this diffuse light in comparison to bright sun, which is a point source. Point sources cast harsh black shadows and diffuse sources hardly cast shadows at all.
Consider the bathroom in which you brushed your teeth this morning. Since each of you is in a different location, the bathrooms will all be different—except for one thing. All of them will have diffuse lighting created by fluorescent tubes or multiple incandescent bulbs. The arrangement of the lighting is designed to flood the person standing in front of the mirror with light from multiple sources and directions, which creates a diffuse lighting effect.
As we struggle to come to full alert after rising from a nights sleep, most of us would not want see ourselves as we really are. The designers of bathroom fixtures know this and give us diffuse light.
Diffuse light minimizes texture. Think of the surface of a basketball. It has a pebbled texture. But you won’t see much texture if the basketball is lit with diffuse light. If you light the basketball from the side with more of a point light source such as a spot light, the texture will pop.
As we age, we get wrinkles in our skin. But most of us don’t like to age. The diffuse lighting in bathrooms again comes to our rescue. The wrinkles are minimized.
Think about how photographers use different kinds of lighting and other techniques to either emphasize or minimize characteristics of a subject. In a portraiture class I had in college, we used Tri-X Ortho for portraits of men—but never women. Ortho films are not sensitive to red. They photograph red objects as if they were black. When you meet me in person, you will see that I am an old codger, the perfect subject for ortho film. The skin imperfections that I have as a result of age are reddish. With ortho film, they will photograph darker than they would with normal black and white film. Skin imperfections are emphasized resulting in a “character” portrait.
When I was I college, we would never use such a film on women. If a woman wore red lipstick, her lips would photograph as black. This would not be desirable since Goth as a fashion statement hadn’t been invented yet.
As visual and word reporters, your best asset is your integrity.
Photoshop is an amazing tool but it can get you fired too if editorial photojournalism is manipulated. Glamour photography has always been manipulated. Anytime a software operation creates something that does not look real, it is over manipulated.
I am glad that unretouched photographs represents a new style making its way into fashion.
What is your take?
People of the screen
Kevin Kelly in his essay in the Nov. 23, 2008 New York Times Magazine ( http://bit.ly/17EZDq) wrote, “We are people of the screen now. Last year, digital-display manufacturers cranked out four billion new screens, and they expect to produce billions more in the coming years. That’s one new screen each year for every human on earth. With the advent of electronic ink, we will start putting watchable screens on any flat surface. The tools for screen fluency will be built directly into these ubiquitous screens.”
Kelly calls for tools that will enable a person to search an archive and find visual clips as easily as one can find specific references in text by using an index.
The task of building visual tools for story telling has never been easier. While I acknowledge being an Apple computer fan, I think the explosion of visual story telling began with the development of the iLife programs from Apple. iPhoto allows management of the digital photos that are now the predominant picture medium for archiving family events. Family print albums are being replaced by slide shows on laptops or wide-screen televisions. Pixel editing programs, such as Photoshop, allow creation of images limited only by imagination to the point of being a major ethical concern for editorial photography. Another iLife program, allows one to easily create a DVD of your creative efforts in iPhoto or iMovie. Need music for your soundtrack? iTunes comes to the rescue.
Visual images can now be layered together in much the same way that writers craft a story. Vast amounts of textual material can be searched to retrieve documents of interest. But search and retrieval is much harder to do for pictures and movie clips. First there is the storage problem of the clips themselves. Images take much more storage compared to words in a text files. Both still photos and movies can have meta data and search methods for image retrieval do exist now. The relatively new Apple product, Final Cut Server, has a rich and customizable meta data system that includes adding comments or key words to any segment of a movie clip. But this software is complex and expensive and is not intended for amateur use.
The tools we have today were unimaginable 10 years ago. The average product life cycle of a digital camera is about a year. The life cycle of the Adobe Suite of products used to create information documents and publish them is 18 months. Every time I conclude that not much more can be done to improve journalists’ tools, something new comes out that amazes me.
The rapid change in technical developments in image creation makes it imperative that students and practitioners of story telling must devote time to learn about new practices. While some people abhor technology and the time it takes to learn it, we can no long ignore it. We are definitely in a work environment that demands life-long education. Much of that education will be self-study.
I am sure that some day the tools will exist that will make visual literacy at par with verbal literacy. That will only improve our ability to tell stories with impact, using both words and pictures.
The I-Ball as an eyeball
I-Ball serves as a battlefield eyeball.
Just when you think you’ve seen it all comes the I-Ball. What is it? It looks like a baseball but you throw it like a grenade. It’s a new defensive weapon for the military. While aloft and when it hits the ground, it sends a view of the battlefield back to the soldiers that launched it. Though named to the I-Ball, it is mechanical eyeball scanning the battlefield for the soldiers that threw it. The eyeball is an example of low-altitude reconnaissance photography.
One wonders if Apple Computer will file a lawsuit. After all, Apple sells iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie, and more. Apple may view the eyeball as violation of their brand. Apple would probably be happy if the I-Ball were able to download music from iTunes as well as make battlefield photographs.
Sarah Palin and Africa
So maybe Sarah Palin does know that Africa is a continent.
MSNBC anchor David Shuster attributed the information that Palin didn’t know the difference between a country and a continent to Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy advisor. (Source: A senior Fellow at the Institute of Nonexistence.)
Apparently, Martin Eisenstadt and the policy institute he represents—the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy—does not exist. The “institute” is only a web site. Other publications taken in by the ruse include The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times.
Interviews of Sarah Palin showed that she was not as prepared on issues and world events as she should have been. That impression allowed the Martin Eisenstadt hoax to take hold.
We have enough false claims during a heated election campaign from the candidates themselves and their political parties. We don’t need elaborate hoaxes to further cloud truth in the minds of the so-called “informed electorate.”
It is surprising that The New Republic was once again duped by the same methods use by their fired writer Stephen Glass to fabricate stories in the 1990s. Glass created a web site as part of a web of deceit to support his dummy reporter’s notes backing a story about a convention of hackers that never happened. Most of the articles Glass wrote were false.
There are two trends that are only likely to further reduce credibility of the news. The dire economic times has caused a severe retrenchment of newsrooms leaving fewer reporters to check sources. The 24/7 news cycle of news organizations web sites create a rush to be first online without proper source checking. The staff operating news web sites do not necessarily have the same values regarding accuracy as to their traditional print colleagues. There is sometimes less concern with the initial accuracy of a story paired with an attitude that initial errors can be corrected later by simply editing the web pages. The press does not have to be stopped and the printing plates changed. So why worry about initial accuracy if errors can so easily be corrected when found?
Worry about accuracy is the essence of journalism.
Media loves controversy, especially if it appears to come from within a political campaign team. This kind of information would attract interest, especially if it were true. But it apparently was not true. People who purport to be journalists must have a total dedication to seek the truth and report it. Repeating false information is not journalism. MSNBC, The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times shamed their reputations for forgetting basic reporting standards.
Obama wins!
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-11-05-obamamoment_N.htm?csp=DailyBriefing
I ask you read the short article above to get a sense of why this election was so important to many of my generation.
The founding fathers wrote in the Declaration of Independence adopted by Congress on July4, 1776, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Under the laws at that time the only men that were equal were white. Blacks were slaves and women could not vote. That is just to say that this country was not always perfect, and will never be perfect. Each generation does the best it can to ensure opportunities are better for our children and grandchildren.
The USA Today article quoted young people who are your age or close to it. But I was particularly interested in the voices of the people who were part of the Civil Rights movement. You should pay particular attention to what they say because you do not know that history as intimately as they lived it. Read their comments and you will know that the election of Obama marks an event perhaps more important than anything else in their lives.
Taylor Rogers listened to Martin Luther King Jr. speak the night before he was killed.
Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell both worked for President Bush but were emotional about the coming Obama presidency. You recall that Powell formally endorsed Obama.
Carolyn Brown is the daughter of the man who brought Brown vs. Board of Education to the Supreme Court of the United States. That decision ended “separate but equal” schools and other public accommodations.
Charles Evers, comments on the contribution of his slain brother Medgar Evers.
Carolyn McKinstry remembered four girlfriends who were killed in a church bombing.
Franklin McCain staged the first lunch counter sit-in in Greensboro, N.C.
Minnijean Trickey was one of the nine students who integrated Central High School in Little Rock. Will Counts, close friend of mine, made pictures of the integration of Central High in Little Rock in 1957. One of those pictures was selected by the Associate Press as one of the 100 best news pictures of the last century. The picture is the visual definition of hate. Hazel Massery was tormenting the young black woman Elizabeth Eckford, another member of the Little Rock nine. The story of the picture that became an icon of the conflicts over desegregation is told in “A Life is More Than a Moment: the Desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High,” published by IU Press. The two women were reconciled in 1997.
Rufus Horton was at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 when Martin Luther King made his “I have a Dream” speech.
Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., reflected on the time he was left beaten and bloody on the Pettus bridge. In March 1965, “about 600 civil rights marchers were attacked by state troopers and county sheriff’s deputies, who tear gassed and pummeled them with clubs. Scenes of the day, broadcast around the world, helped inspire Congress’ passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”
The 1960s were years in which ordinary people did extraordinary things. The wanted the words in the Declaration of Independence to ring true for all citizens regardless of the color of their skin. They risked their lives, the lives of their families and their livelihoods for a goal of equality.
We all stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us. Women now vote and hold office, two have been candidates for vice president and one was nearly her party’s candidate for president.
Now we have elected an African-American as the 44th president. Those of us who have lived long enough to witness the struggle can only marvel at the outcome. Obama is human. He won’t be perfect. But the country has decided that color no longer matters in deciding who will lead the country. The words of the founding fathers are now more meaningful to all of us.
Shoot or help?
I was asked by a colleague to comment on John Moore’s pictures of the Assassination of Benazir Bhutto made by John Moore (http://bit.ly/17EZDq).
My response:
Sometimes a photojournalist is faced with the question of whether to shoot pictures or whether to help in some crisis situation. Shooting pictures and helping victims are often not compatible. If you are focused on one, you are not doing the other. Your job is to seek the news and report it. But you are also human. First you must know the limits of your knowledge and ability. Do you know CPR? Do you know how to stop excessive bleeding? Sometimes lack of knowledge actually makes matters worse for the victim. I would never want to second-guess a photographer in the field making a personal choice to shoot or help. John Moore’s pictures are a very important record of a major news event. I, for one, am glad he shot them.
Plagiarism as “Art”
This was originally written as a letter to the editor of the New York Times in reference to (http://bit.ly/6rq1E). The Times chose not to run my comment.
The December 6, 2007, New York Times article entitled “A Copy Is Art, Then What’s the Original?” is disturbing on several fronts. The story describes the “work” of artist Richard Prince who is described as a “pioneer of appropriation art-photographing other photographs, usually from magazine ads, then enlarging and exhibiting them in galleries.” Appropriation art maybe accepted in the world of art but it is wrong from perspectives of both ethics and creativity. In the world of ordinary people who respect and value true creative effort, it is plain and simple plagiarism. Simply put, it is theft of someone else’s work product and calling it your own. Why would the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum glorify theft by honoring the thief with exhibition space? The reporter, Randy Kennedy, left this and other questions unanswered.