After reading Photoshop Semiotics: Research in the Age of Digital Manipulation by Michael Emme and Anna Kirova, I did some research about digital editing within news articles. I think it is important to understand that image manipulation can be used in sources that reach thousands, even millions of people. Images that exaggerated or that don't tell the entire story can have an impact on how we perceive events.
I found two stories that document how altered images that depicted violence created a public uproar.
The first image was a photo of fighting in Lebanon. It was poorly manipulated by freelance photographer, Adnan Hajj and published in a Reuters news article. Hajj used the Photoshop cloning tool to make the smoke from burning buildings seem darker, larger and more intense. He also Photoshopped another image with an Israeli Jet fighter dropping three flares (the original photo only showed one flare)
The other image was printed in the New York Daily News paper and depicted an image of Boston bombing victims. One of the victims legs was doctored to cover up her wounded leg. Many people believed that this undermined the severity of the event by not showing hurt victims, while others suggested that the newspaper should not have chosen that image if they felt they had to "fix" it. The papers spokes-person, Ken Frydman stated that the New York Daily News chose to edit the photo out of respect for the victims and their families.
I personally feel like the first image was intentionally altered to promote a certain viewpoint about Israeli- Lebanon conflict, where the Boston Marathon image recorded events accurately. I believe that the New York Daily News had far better intentions than the photographer from Reuters.
No comments:
Post a Comment