Charles Apple

A couple of photojournalistic controversies were in full-blown fury by the end of the week.

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Controversy No. 1: The Case of the Rampant Photoshopper

Carrie Niland, a photo editor with the Seattle Times, recently discovered a photographic deception involving a former intern.

Niland writes in her blog that the photo…

…recently ran in a national photo magazine. While talking to one of our younger photographers about the toning and light in the photograph, we happened to do an archive search and discovered the former intern shot the picture during his internship for the paper.

Here’s what won a College Photographer of the Year award in 2005 and appeared in a Photo District News magazine article last month citing the former intern as one of the top 30 photographers under the age of 30:

Here’s how the photo appears in the Seattle Times‘ archive and how it looked in the paper when it ran in 2005:

Niland writes:

We discovered the toning/copyright issue when talking to a younger photographer who was curious about limits and what is allowed and what isn’t.

If one of our photographers turned a photo like this in while shooting for us, there would be severe consequences. But yet photojournalists are doing it all over the world and being rewarded for their work. This photographer received national attention—both by placing in CPOY and then in PDN with this photograph.

What message does this send to photographers that are doing good work that is honest and straight-up? And how do we help photographers think about what they are trying to say with a picture IN the camera and not afterwards using a computer?

And she adds, in a later post:

This picture was shot for a newspaper, and is owned by that newspaper. I see no logical, ethical reason for it to be altered. Not for a contest (either CPOY or PDN)…

I am not saying that dodging and burning shouldn’t be done. But I think this picture goes beyond “burning the edges down to take away from distracting features” that the photographer claims.

See more work by this former intern here.

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Brouhaha No. 2: The Case of the Surly Iwo Vets

The Business & Media Institute — an apparently politically conservative web site — reported this week about World War II vets who are offended at this week’s Time magazine cover.

Time abandoned its red-edged design motif for only the second time in 85 years to present a special issue on global warming:

TB&MI’s Jeff Poor reports:

Donald Mates, an Iwo Jima veteran, told the Business & Media Institute on April 17 that using that photograph for that cause was a “disgrace.”

“It’s an absolute disgrace,” Mates said. “Whoever did it is going to hell. That’s a mortal sin. God forbid he runs into a Marine that was an Iwo Jima survivor.”

The man who led the platoon that raised the flag over Iwo Jima’s Mt. Suribachi in February 1945 — Keith Wells — wasn’t too damn happy about the Time cover, either:

“That global warming is the biggest joke I’ve ever known,” Wells told the Business & Media Institute. “[W]e’ll stick a dadgum tree up somebody’s rear if they want that and think that’s going to cure something.

The illustration is credited to Arthur Hochstein, the art director for Time. We presume Mr. Hochstein will be on guard for angry octogenarian Iwo Jima survivors who hope to sneak up behind him with trees.

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