Lying Photos: Manipulative Media Thrives

Instructions to this Assignment: 
Read through the links and view the photos, then complete a blog reflection. Use the questions below as a guide. You can discuss your own points or use the questions for help. Your reflection should address at least FIVE issues/questions in at least a five paragraph reflection.

Questions I chose and my response to them: 

• Identify one or two photos that really stood out for you, and explain why they did.

There is one with Barack Obama standing in front of the sight of an oil spill (#9 in the *link), and in the image, The Economist magazine had removed two people that he was leaned over talking with.  There was a shorter woman that he was trying to hear, and so when she was cropped out, it made it look as though his head was cast down in sadness or frustration.  I found that it had an impact on me because it is depicting a political person in a way that is untrue to the situation.  I also wonder how Barack Obama would have reacted, had he come across the image himself.

• Do you think some photos are manipulated by the media because the public expects celebrities and politicians to be "airbrushed" and to appear perfect? Do you think it is acceptable? Discuss.

It is good to show the brighter side of people, and perhaps removing a blemish or two is a good thing. But as far as slimming the person down goes, I'm not so sure if that is what what should be done.  It's not that I think it is a bad thing, but I am not sure if it is a good thing to do either; in a sense, I am neutral.  If it is for something like a product however, like for a skin care item, and they are editing the images of people who use there product, then I don't think that is fair and is very shady.  The same goes with weight-loss programs that slim down the people in their magazine or online advertisements.  You can edit a persons body for a skin care product ad, or clean a person's skin for a weight loss ad, and still have me not complain too much.  However, if it is done in a way that makes your product's results untruthful, say, that you only clean up the person's skin in the "after" picture and not in the "before" when showing their weight loss results, then I have greater concerns about the shadiness of your business.  

• Do you think magazine editors/illustrators are justified in manipulating photos to make the image more artful, entertaining or compelling? Discuss.

From an artists point of view, I feel that artistic manipulation of photos for magazines is an essential thing and really helps to make the images more appealing to the reader.  Do I think that it is realistic, no, not so much, and the more manipulating you do to the photo, the more detached from reality it becomes.  However, there are some exceptions to this, and I believe that it is up to the illustrators as to how far they want to go with it.

When working with touchy subjects, such as natural disasters, maybe the photographs should not be tampered with; you should not make the scene appear any more better/worse than it already is, and should instead let the photo speak for itself.  Do not past in images of screaming children into the background just to build a "dramatic" effect.  The most you should ever do with a photo of this nature is maybe crop it and then make minor adjustments to the colour, brightness and exposure so that the scene is easier to see. 

• Some photos that are famous for being fake are quite old. Were you surprised to learn that photo manipulation and staging occurred long before the digital age (computers, Internet, etc)?

Yes, it is harder to believe that the manipulation of photos occurred as it did before the age of computers and digital images, however, it does not mean that I felt that it was impossible.  People often played with things like exposure times in an image so that a person walking in and out of a scene would appear as a ghost.  And, I guess in the fairy photos, it was carefully positioned cardboard cutouts that did the trick.  The one thing that I find interesting though, and that I haven't given much thought to before, was just how gullible people were during the time of early photography.  Well, maybe gullible isn't the correct word to use.  As a human race, we are no more gullible now as a species, on a mental-processing level, than we were a thousand years before —ah, perhaps that is a little too deep.  What I'm trying to say is that people are more used to being tricked, thus their eyes are more adapted to it and can spot out a fake a little bit easier than the generations before.  Does that make any sense? 

• If you were a professional photojournalist do you think you could avoid being tempted to manipulate or stage a photo if you knew it would be a great picture? Explain. 

I don't know.  I feel that, as an artistic person, this may be a challenge for me, as I will constantly be seeing different ways that I can make a raw image look better.  I would be always tempted to re-crop and re-colour an image so that it was more appealing to me and the others who would be seeing it.  It is a hard thing to say.  I guess that I would just follow the policies of those of the media corporation where I worked.  

This is my last post for my Journalism class.  Just in case I don't have any others after this, I just wanted you to know that. 

I had a good time with this course and feel that I have a better understanding of the world of journalism than I did before entering this class.  I hope that you enjoyed reading what I wrote (to my teacher and my one follower I gained somewhere along the line) because I took enjoyment in writing it.

See you around the internet.