In the race against time, a question of ethics

Modern newspapers work to a clock that deals in seconds and minutes, rather than days or weeks, and so must photographers

In the previous week’s column we discussed how the digitalisation of photography has changed the face of photojournalism and how this has, at times, had the photographer at an ethical crossroads.
Modern newspapers work to a clock that deals in seconds and minutes, rather than days or weeks, and so must photographers. Gone are the days when a photographer could spend a few days searching for that perfect picture, not as rails against time, he sometimes has to rely on sheer talent and luck to get a printable photograph. These time constraints can sometimes force him to chose an unethical path, doctoring or embellishing an image to suit the editorial.
There has been a trend of late in the print media where photographers are increasingly asked to concentrate on the aesthetics of composition, rather than content. Their roles have become akin to creative visualisers rather than documenters of news. Celebrities, lifestyle and other ‘soft’ topics have become the rule, and social photography the exception.
Take the case of the photojournalist who was asked to cover a fashion show in the morning, and then a portrait of losing mayoral candidate just one hour later. The photojournalist needs time to move from one frame of mind from where lighting plays a major role while snapping pictures of models sashaying down a ramp to another, where a man is at one of life’s many cusps. If he’s not careful, he could end up with a sashaying politician.
Many say the camera cannot lie, and that is true only in the sense that the images it captures must have existed in one form or another in time. But it is not always clear if those images have been manipulated to alter, or to stage an event that never actually happened. Staging a photograph only adds insult to the already injured ethics of photojournalism, and it is all the more injurious when one knows that ‘staging’ has been done by some of the finest photographers in the world.
Though photographers in the West have suffered its fair share of lapses on the ethical front, in India, it has become an epidemic. In one of the most macabre incidents, three of the country’s top photographers dug up a four-day-old grave of a small boy to highlight the catastrophe of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. That the boy was in no way connected to the event seemed to not have bothered them in the least.
Digitally manipulating a photograph is as bad as staging one. Digital manipulation is relatively easy to accomplish, hard to detect, and perhaps more alarming, is that the alteration takes place in the original image, hence checking authenticity is virtually impossible. This is why courts these days tend not to use photographs as evidence, and why they probably won’t do so in the future either.
Photographers will use numerous arguments to defend themselves. They’ll say reporters cook up quotes, sub-editors use blatantly misleading headlines, and feature writers plagiarise, but there’s really no excuse…for any of the above. The reader is your god, and if you fail him, then there truly will be hell to pay.

The noughties and the age of photographic digitisation

Visual messages have the power to persuade, educate and entertain and thus put a great responsibility on the photographer

It may have been 1993, when American photojournalists got their hands on the Digital Lens Reflex (D-SLR) camera in large numbers, but it was way back in 1973 that the technology was created by Kodak in Rochester, New York.

Kodak’s body was big and scary enough to put any professional ill at ease. This, however, was the R&D model and nowhere near what it would look like when it entered mass production.

The first commercial digital SLR (Kodak DCS-100) was launched in 1991, it had a modified Nikon F3 SLR body, a modified drive unit with an external storage unit connected via a cable, and a 1.3 megapixel that cost a whopping $30,000.

Through the decade (1990 to 1999) numerous players jumped into the digital photography market: Canon, Nikon, Kodak, Pentax, Fuji to name a few. But in 1999, it was Nikon that took the lead with the launch of the Nikon D1, which marked the beginning of the end of the film camera era (I was very lucky to have used the D1 in its launch year during my stint with a newspaper in North India, though it was only meant for very important assignments).
In India, forward-thinking newspapers — which up until than had been using negative scanners or print scanners for pictures to be digitally transferred on to their Quark pages — grabbed at this opportunity by ensuring that their respective photo departments went digital. But it was only in mid-2002, when Nikon launched the D-100, that the death rattle of film, turned into rigor mortis.

Newspapers that hadn’t cottoned onto the virtues of digital photography now swiftly converted to D-SLR in the hope that by cutting down on film purchase and printing they would in turn cut overall costs. It worked, and the shift would become a pivotal moment in the publishing industry.

But with the invasion of technology into the artistic field came with it a crisis of ethics and photography took a hammering. Images started appearing having been digitally manipulated to catch the viewer’s eye.

Visual messages have the power to persuade, educate and entertain and thus put a great responsibility on the photographer. Take for instance some of the recent images taken after the advent of D-SLR and Adobe’s Photoshop; an increasing number of manipulated pictures have started to find space on magazine covers, in newspapers and on wire services.

But ethics in photography is a whole other column