Everyone can be a photo editor in this age of inexpensive digital cameras and a variety of tools available for altering photographs. In the newsroom, however, some photo editing can do more harm than good.
Recently, The Economist took heat for a Gulf Coast oil spill cover that featured an isolated President Obama standing at the coast’s edge with an oil rig in the background. The magazine altered the source photograph to remove a local elected official standing next to the president. As you can see in a side-by-side comparison by NYTimes.com, the original image and the altered cover tell very different stories. In response to NYTimes.com claims of unethical photo editing, Emma Duncan, deputy editor of The Economist, said:
I asked for Ms. Randolph to be removed because I wanted readers to focus on Mr. Obama, not because I wanted to make him look isolated. That wasn’t the point of the story. “The damage beyond the spill” referred to on the cover, and examined in the cover leader, was the damage not to Mr. Obama, but to business in America.
Well, whether The Economist editorial staff intended to or not, the now-public photo alterations have undermined their cover’s message and impacted the credibility of future cover images as well.
Unfortunately, BP has created its own credibility problem by altering photos, as if their recent PR missteps were not enough. Treehugger.com, one of the most widely-read environmental blogs, reported that a recent BP photo of the company’s oil spill crisis command center in Houston had been altered to add radar images to blank monitor screens. The image appeared prominently on the company’s website. In an article about BP’s altered photo drama, Washington Post energy reporter Steve Mufson’s lead paragraph read:
Apparently BP is no more adept at doctoring photos than it is at plugging deep-sea oil leaks.
Ouch.
Update (7.22.10): more photos doctored by BP continue to come to light, as reported by the Washington Post.
While photos may have to be tweaked or fixed in photo editing programs like Adobe Photoshop before production, communicators and designers should be careful that their image changes don’t alter the original, intended message of the photograph. That’s where The Economist and BP ran into trouble.
Every photograph should tell a story. When sharing enhanced images with the public and the media, transparency is key. Organizations must make sure that story behind the photograph and the story presented in the photograph actually match. Any inconsistencies raises red flags from the media, and the resulting coverage can hurt organizations’ reputations and offer the public an unfocused view of the message they originally intended to convey.
Along the same lines… this article is another example of how photo re-touching and altering can change the meaning of an image:
http://www.care2.com/causes/womens-rights/blog/the-camera-doesn-t-lie-or-does-it-extreme-photo-retouching-of-plus-size-model-shocks/
Thanks for sharing that article, Kathy! Photo altering images is definitely not a new thing in the fashion world, but can have long-lasting effects on how the photo subject and viewers see themselves. This is further proof why we should be cautious when editing photographs and avoid changing the story expressed in the original image.