“I intensely dislike seeing any of our pictures manipulated in any way.”
David Viggers, Reuters? photo editor
From an editorsweblog post on UK newspapers that cropped body parts out of their pictures of the Madrid bombings. Yeah, it’s another self-important declaration of purity by a photo editor. It should offer an excuse to go off on photographers … I tried but my heart ain’t in it. Instead I’ll muse a bit on the mystique of photojournalism.
I should have an implacable disgust for photographers, who have a knack for making life miserable for us deskbound hacks. Sure, there are wonderful ones who turn their work in on time, get all the names right and report stuff the reporters have missed. They just never seem to be one whose photo I’ve got in hand when it’s two minutes before deadline and I’ve discovered some essential fact missing from their caption info.
And there’s this business about photos being pristine objects that we philistines dare not touch, lest we foil the photographer’s intent. Please. A photograph represents something that happened in a fraction of a second within the confines of a single viewfinder. Sure, a photo doesn’t lie — it just leaves out 99.9 percent of the “truth” that a camera can’t capture.
There’s reason to be skeptical about photography and its practitioners, but I don’t think it’s my forgiving nature that explains why I’ll cut photographers more slack than just about anybody else in this biz. I think it’s because nobody else does what they do.
They cannot do their work from the phone in the office. They have to get out among real people, take their pictures, ask their names.
They lug around piles of heavy gear and when the gunfire erupts, they start looking for muzzle flashes and point their cameras toward the fire.
They find ways to stay alive in places where being a foreigner can get you killed.
They find ways to capture weeks of reporting in a single image.
If I have to put up with a few annoyances to get all that, I’ll take it. (And lord knows their complaints about the copy desk could fill volumes.)
UPDATE, TO CLARIFY: The Reuters guy was upset that papers had either removed a clearly visible body part from one section of a photo, or retouched it to make it less, well, sickening. I don’t think he was talking about cropping.
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