Newsdesigner.com | DOCTORING PHOTOS IN LONDON

DOCTORING PHOTOS IN LONDON

1:33 PM, March 16, 2004

Alert reader Brian left a comment in the El Pais post below noting that the British papers "cleaned up" (read: removed) the severed limb in Pablo Torres Guerrero's photo and defended themselves later. The Guardian has the scoop (Note: The Guardian's requiring registration now). Here are the photos:

original

The original photo as it ran in El Pais. The bloody limb is visible in the bottom left of the photo.

guardian

The Guardian changed the limb to an unobtrusive gray.

telegraph

The Telegraph removed it entirely.

times

The Times also removed it.

The Telegraph's picture editor, Bob Bodman, said:

"It's a question of taste. At the end of the day our readers know there has been a horrific explosion. You clean up an image if you feel it does not change the context - in this case had that object been at the side we would have cropped it. It didn't really add anything to the picture."

Even David Viggers, senior pictures editor at Reuters, which distributed the picture, doesn't seem to be too worked up about it:

"I wouldn't have removed it myself, although I can understand why some people have chosen to do so. It didn't alter the context of the image."

Well. Those Brits do have some different standards. I just can't see that happening here. At least not any newsroom I've worked in. You might find yourself all over Romenesko in the morning. I seem to remember a pretty big stink over the Post-Dispatch's disappearing Coke can and National Geographic's magical moving pyramids. It's not a long walk from there to Brian Walski.

So where's the hooplah about this on our end of the Atlantic? If these sorts of things erode the credibility of the news photograph, shouldn't we be raising a bit of a ruckus? The sheer volume of vein-popping e-mail would crash Daniel Okrent's computer if the New York Times did this. True, it is "over there," but does that really matter anymore?

By the way, for the "Are American newspapers too squeamish?" file, someone on this message board says the Washington Post ran the photo undoctored on the front page, but I can't find an image of that day's page to verify. Any Posties out there confirm that?

>Editors 'clean up' bomb photo [The Guardian]

Comments

Heads up: After you hit "post" things may be slow and you may get an error. Most likely, your comment did post. Apologies. I'm looking for a fix.

"It really didn't add anything to the picture."

Huh? WTF?
That's a bloody limb, for crissake.
It got my stomach churning a bit.

Notice the Virginian-Pilot just cropped it out.
THAT was a better choice.
But if this happened in my town, I think the bloody limb is part of the story.

Posted by: Rich Boudet at March 16, 2004 10:15 PM

Ya know, England has seen plenty of the real thing - we've had people getting blown up here "in real life" for 20+ years - do we need to see it splashed across front pages?

Posted by: convict99 at March 18, 2004 1:42 PM

I'm certainly not saying you do. It's a perfectly defensible position to refrain from running gruesome photos like that. What is not defensible, in my mind, is altering news photographs in any way. If there's something in a photo you don't want to run in your newspaper, then don't use the dang photo.

Posted by: newsdesigner at March 18, 2004 2:15 PM

Editing a photo in this way is no different that a writer who changes facts that are difficult. If the photo doesn't work as is then don't use it, but to allow for selective editing of what people take for reality is to invite a further loss of confidence in the press.

Posted by: tswan at April 5, 2004 7:15 AM

I saw a similar editing job in an Australian pictorial magazine where a the exposed breast of a dead woman was altered to conceal the nipple. Whether it was done well, or whether it was required at all is completely beside the point. The "right" thing to do would be to "redact" using a black box or coarse pixelisation: you are 'spared' viewing the image, but know that the editors have made changes in an otherwise clearly life-life picture. Compared to this, shifting the pyramids closer together is trivial.

Posted by: James at July 13, 2004 3:36 AM

i was in school when i found out about the bombing and i was absolutly appalled by what i had heard. my question is why do they do it and what do they get from it?
too be honest tony blair needs to wake up and relise that we do need to do something about it and open his eyes.
i dont think that what they queen said will have any fuss.
she said "im deeply shocked by what happened and i send sympathy to those affected.
they all need to wake up.

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