A picture is worth 1,000 lies

DO NOT BELIEVE WHAT YOU SEE. Today's technology makes manipulating and altering photographs so easy that a child can do it. Johnny is at bat and misses the ball. No problem-move the ball from under the bat to right on the bat and see Johnny swing for the fences. New software makes anything possible, from the simple white lie (cleaning up a spot on a child's dress for her second birthday picture) to outrageous distortion (if junior flunked out of school, his smiling face can be put on the body of a graduating senior holding up a diploma). When it is family lore, the cheating might be ignored. Yet, when news photos are compromised, "seeing is believing" and "a picture is worth a thousand words" ring hollow. How can we be sure that what we see is true, that it is a real representation of what actually took place?

Manipulating news photographs and moving pictures is not new. Photographers have been rearranging reality by staging and manipulating negatives ever since photography began. They did it in the Civil War. Most of the war photos blatantly were staged. Newsreel cameramen from silent film days on created reality for their cameras--in war time, opposing armies fought in front of the camera as friendly soldiers put on the enemy's uniforms and ran after each other. Carefully constructed miniatures were bombed and set ablaze and the pictures sold as depicting the real thing.

Throughout the 20th century, many events were staged especially for the camera. It used to be common practice for photographers to carry a broken doll in their trunk so they could place it at an accident site to create a poignant news photo. This practice only went out of fashion when too many photographs of train wrecks and freeway crashes featured a twisted doll in the foreground.

A Dartmouth College computer scientist, Hany Farid, has created a website that documents digital tampering in the media, politics, and law. As he points out, "Photography lost its innocence many years ago." Farid writes that, "as early as the 1930s, shortly after the first commercially available camera was introduced, [the Soviet Union's Joseph] Stalin had his enemies 'air-brushed' out of photographs." Some of his early examples show a famous portrait of Pres. Abraham Lincoln in 1860--a composite of Lincoln's head and a Southern politician's body. An 1865 Mathew Brady photograph adds a missing general to a picture so his documentation of Gen. William T. Sherman posing with his generals would be complete.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the easiest way to doctor a photograph simply was to remove the offending image. Farid shows an altered 1936 photo with China's Mao Tse-Tung that had his associate, Po Ku, removed because he had fallen out of favor. In a 1937 image, Germany's Adolf Hitler had one of his top officials, Joseph Goebbels, removed from the original because he momentarily was angry at Goebbels. In 1942, Italy's Benito Mussolini removed a horse handler from a photograph to show him alone on his steed in a heroic pose. Farid's examples show what photo editors resorted to in the 1980s and 1990s. TV Guide created a 1989 cover image of talk-show host Oprah Winfrey by putting her head onto the body of a 1979 picture of actress Ann-Margret. In 1992, Texas Monthly put Gov. Ann Richards' head onto the body of a model astride a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. In 1994, Time took O.J. Simpson's mug shot and made it darker and more menacing. The hoax was revealed when Newsweek printed the real picture unretouched.

Yet, all of this is small stuff compared to what a digital camera and software such as Photoshop can do today. A University of Wisconsin brochure inserted a black student into a crowd of white football fans to show a more diverse enrollment. In 2003, a digital composite of a British soldier in Basra gesturing to Iraqi civilians urging them to seek cover appeared on the front page of The Los Angeles Times. The 30-year veteran photographer was fired after it was discovered he had combined two of his photographs to "improve" the composition.

In 2007, newspaper photographer Allan Dietrich, who had been with the Toledo Ohio Blade since 1989, resigned after admitting he had altered a photo that appeared in the paper and had submitted nearly 80 digitally altered photos, 58 of which appeared in print. The changes ranged from erasing people, tree limbs, utility poles, electrical wires, electrical outlets, and other background elements from photographs to adding tree branches and shrubbery. When asked why this was a problem, Blade editor Ron Royhab wrote, "It is dishonest. Journalism, whether by using words or pictures, must be an accurate representation of the truth."

Some may contend that some digital alterations--changing the color of the sky to a more dramatic hue, erasing irrelevant or annoying objects and people from the background, taking two pictures and merging them for higher dramatic content--simply add to the photographer's arsenal of techniques and turn news photos into art. Some might argue old-fashioned cropping of a photograph changes its meaning and that digital changes are not any different than the time-honored technique of enlarging parts of a negative. Few complain about any digital trick used in creative, non-news photography because art is, by nature, manipulative and part of the artist's conception that ends up hanging on the wall of a gallery or studio.