ku # 619 ~ my name is Friday, I carry a badge
Thursday, July 30, 2009 at 11:34AM 
Flowers on a portage ~ Bog River • click to embiggenThere was a bit of a brouhaha recently over at the NY Times, specifically The NY Times Sunday Magazine.
They published what was essentially a photo essay about real estate ventures gone bad in the current economic dilemma we find ourselves in. I liked the pictures quite a bit and nearly wrote about and posted a link to the essay but, by the time I got around to it, the NYT had pulled the piece from its website.
The reason given for the withdrawal was that the photographer had mislead the NYT because they were under the impression / understanding that he made his pictures with "long exposures, but no digital manipulation" and the NYT stated that as part the intro to the essay. As it turns out, there were, in fact, several pictures that had been altered in the essay - not "little" alterations but big ones.
The photographer had created some pictures wherein he cropped the original image in half and then duplicated and flipped that half in order to make a perfectly symmetrical picture - one side was a perfect mirror of the other side. The NYT said that they were deceived by the photographer. The photographer said, "no, you just don't understand my work as presented".
Having done quite a number of magazine editorial assignments in my time, it's difficult for me to understand how this misunderstanding / deception occurred. In the normal course of events, there are pre-shoot discussions between the parties in which basic shoot parameters are laid out and agreed upon. Apparently some things got overlooked.
That said, you can see the pictures on the photographer's website - click on the letter "p" and then click on "RUINS OF THE GILDED AGE". The pictures that were altered are pretty obvious and I am left wondering how an experience photo editor would miss it (the alterations).
That said, the photographer, Edgar Martins, has apparently felt the need to explain / defend himself / his work. And so - warning: academic lunatic fringe alert, read at your own risk - he has written a piece wherein he elaborates on his recent realization that ...
... history was no longer linear. In the pulsating world of binary number systems that we live in, history is made, negated and reinvented, all in the space of one minute ... [A]s fraught and as contradictory as much of the information being portrayed often is, it reveals a polymorphic and multiform reality, a world of flux and flow that is in a perpetual state of uncertain transformation ... [I] accept the probabilistic nature of the universe as a fact ...
... and so on. Obfuscating bloviation aside, I understand what he's getting at - in order to make a point, he likes to alter his images, he likes to severe the link between photography (as a cohort of/with) and the real. Fine. No problem. Have at it.
However, unlike when I visit an art gallery where I often enjoy a certain break with the real in order to make a point, when I pick up a newspaper (even the Sunday supplement when it deals with news), I really do expect to be presented with something more closely aligned with the real.
When one is given an assignment by a news organization /publication to picture / describe / represent, in this case, the actual realities of an economy gone bad, one might think that a picture maker might realize that what a news organization wants (in fact, requires) is, in the words of Officer Joe Friday, "Just the facts, ma'am" and nothing but the facts.
Unless so specified by the publication, a picture maker should leaves his/her academic theories and ruminations in the bag and just show us the pictures.
Reader Comments (1)
Just as well he's a photographer and not a writer.
Like you, I get the whole idea of representing rality, the artistic process he's following etc.
But, to state a project as not involving digital processing when clearly it does is a flat out lie and a clear misrepresentation to NYT. He's off in another world with his insistence that it isn't misrepresentation.
And as you say, he's completely missed the point about the intentions and demands of a journalistic publisher.