This is from the blog On the Other Side, and pertains to a discussion we had about toning and the ethics of the vignette. The following is just a tiny bit of the rich discussion that appears on the blog. Some good weekend food for thought:
"There is a very fine line with toning pictures. Software programs that most photographers use on a daily basis allow them to do some pretty crazy things. I went to journalism school right at the start of the digital age and essentially the end of using film on a daily basis. We mostly shot film, used a minilab to develop the film, and then scanned them into the computer and used a program like photoshop to slightly adjust the pictures.
There is also a gray area about what is ethical and what isn't. There are the biggies that are fundamental--like cloning someone/something in or out of your frame. But to me the big part of ethics has to do with intention and misleading. Statements like "If I can do it in a darkroom, it's okay" or "This is what the scene looked like to me" aren't good enough reasons. I've seen what used to be done in a darkroom ---and you can do some pretty drastic things.
This is why for me it comes down to the intent of the photographer, and whether or not it misleads the reader. "
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1 comment:
Amanda - thanks for posting this.
I don't think any of us believe a rule book telling us when and where and how much we can interpret is the answer to the photojournalism ethical questions that arise daily. Neither do we want anarchy. We share, I believe, a motivation of photographing with insight and employ reality as our vehicle to that deeper understanding. Photography has its own language, its own grammar. Like a poet, or an editorial writer, we can choose our words carefully, and consider how to present our "argument".
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