Charles Apple

The New York Times hired Portuguese photographer Edgar Martins to shoot photos of construction projects around the U.S., abandoned in the wake of the credit collapse.

The project — Ruins of the Second Gilded Age — ran in the NYT magazine last weekend. Photos were posted at the Times‘ web site.

But that’s when questions popped up. On a discussion board called Metafilter, a user named Unixrat posted Tuesday morning:

I call bullshit on [a particular shot] not being photoshopped. Look at that wooden ‘triangle’ right near the top center.

Sure enough, in the very center of the photo below, there seems to be a little triangle at the top of the far wall. It doesn’t appear to have any structural purpose as a wall frame:

The text in the lower left was added by Unixrat when he subsequently posted an A/B comparison as a GIF animation, comparing this photo to an actual Photoshop mirror image. Unixrat posted:

Check it out. I’ll eat my hat if this is not fakery.

Metafilter user Fishbike replied:

Wow, thanks. When you called this out initially, I couldn’t see it after a very quick glance at the rather small picture. But your A/B comparison makes it obvious. I’m thinking that whatever was left out on the right side by flipping the left side onto it *probably* wasn’t something that affected the point the photographer was trying to make.

George Spiggot posted:

Impossibly symmetrical. Watch his animation. Almost all of the right hand side of the photo is a pixel-perfect copy of the left. This doesn’t happen in real life construction, particularly when ordinary framing wood is involved. You couldn’t achieve this kind of perfect reflection on purpose using real world materials, and even if you did, you couldn’t take a photo of it that looks like this.

And user Yoink posted (and quoted today by Poynter’s Jim Romenesko):

This actually is (or should be) a major embarrassment for the NYT. The simple mirroring could almost be forgiven, but the photographer decided to get cute and photoshop in a few stray boards propped here and there to distract the eye from the perfect symmetry. It might seem a minor thing, but I think there really serious issues of journalistic ethics at stake here.

The New York Times took down the entire gallery, posting:

The pictures in this feature were removed after questions were raised whether they had been digitally altered.

Here’s the whole thread at Metafilter, which has kind of run away with an examination of similar flopped-mirror-image manipulations in the photographer’s previously published work.

Thanks to Romenesko for poynting the way.

—
UPDATE:

Jim posted more links this afternoon.

The discussion in that thread at Metafilter has progressed much, much further. Be sure to check out this one that explains how to catch an image that’s been mirrored.

Plus, Minnesota Public Radio identified Unixrat as Northfield, Minn., programmer Adam Gurno. They posted a nice story and an audio interview with him:

Photo District News posted more evidence of manipulation among the other shots in the photo essay. In addition, the New York Times‘ own photo blog addressed the issue Wednesday.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 9:59 am and is filed under New York Times, Photojournalism, Visual ethics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.