Photographic Impact Examples

Regardless of numerous vulnerabilities, photographs continue to refine peoples’ perception of the world. Despite periodic incidents, society continues to consider photographs real and representational, so they enjoy powerful psychological power. Consider a few authentic and forged photographic impact examples:

• In 1951, during the McCarthy era, a crude photographic forgery that composited a photograph of U.S. Senator Millard Tydings and another of communist leader Earl Browder likely cost Tydings the following election.
• A more recent example of creative image mutation occurred in the 1996 Virginia U.S. Senate election. There, a campaign image appeared with the Democratic challenger’s head pasted onto the body of another person who was shaking hands with the former Virginia governor and President Clinton two years earlier. After discovery, the Republican candidate blamed a media consultant and deleted the image from the commercial.
• Presidential candidate Gary Hart withdrew from the 1988 presidential campaign after a photograph of Donna Rice sitting on his lap aboard the boat Monkey Business publicly circulated.
• Presidential candidate H. Ross Perot withdrew from the 1992 presidential campaign, asserting he was doing so in part because he learned political adversaries were going to circulate a compromising image forgery exploiting his daughter’s face at her forthcoming wedding, hoping to disrupt the festivities.
• Chapter 22 of Anthony Summers’s Official and Confidential—The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover suggests both the CIA and Mafia possessed pictures of J. Edgar Hoover engaged in a compromising activity with his male assistant, Clyde Tolson. The text and the television show Frontline (#1111 aired February 9, 1993) go on to suggest that various interests used these photographs to blackmail J. Edgar Hoover, directly motivating his inept pursuit of the Mafia for decades.
• The Chinese government denied the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred, but the world disagreed based on photographic and videotape evidence.
• The Los Angeles Police Department dismissed police brutality complaints for years but were unable to dismiss the 1991 Rodney King videotape. When the responsible officers were not convicted, the Los Angeles riots began.
• Kurt Waldheim only admitted to being a Nazi officer after being confronted in 1986 with a photograph of him in uniform.

So, it follows that photographs have enjoyed immense persuasive power because they “seem so lifelike.” But digital imaging fundamentally alters photographic procedures.In the process, it revises society’s relationship to the photograph.

Compositing digital images introduces time and space recombinancy that allows images to achieve textual malleability. Rather than describe world leader meetings, it’s now easy to “illustrate” one from image fragments composited into an image. Some people argue there is little difference in doing this since textual descriptions are traditionally based on second-hand accounts subjected to many edits. Now it seems that photography is in the same situation. We have departed the photographic era and have entered a brave new era where alterations abound. Here are a few examples that range from trivial to serious:

• An unidentified employee at U.S. News and World Report reportedly cleaned Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s fingernails in an image taken after she had been campaigning in dusty Pakistan rural communities.
• The Christian Science Monitor reportedly once regularly removed cigarettes from subjects’ hands, even Winston Churchill’s cigar.
• In July 1994, Time magazine’s cover deliberately provided a “photo illustration” of O.J. Simpson starting with his mug shot. Many outraged readers felt the illustration made him appear more sinister than the unaltered mug shot Newsweek published.

Press Ethics

Most print journalists are well aware of the difference between fact or fiction and accurate reporting or fabrication.

• Janet Cook won a Pulitzer Prize for her tragic Washington Post series on a young ghetto boy. She returned the prize when it was learned the boy was a fictional composite.
• The press was singularly indignant when it learned White House spokesman Larry Speakes fabricated quotes from Ronald Reagan for public consumption and presidential spin management.

One can conclude the press generally does not like reporting to fool the public. But does it mind fooling the public in images? Aware that clandestine image manipulations were tantamount to fabricating quotes and textual composites, the National Press Photographers Association Board of Directors adopted the following statement of principle on July 2, 1991:

Statement of Principle

As journalists, we believe the guiding principle of our profession is accuracy, therefore, we believe it is wrong to alter the content of a photograph in any way that deceives the public.

As journalists, we have the responsibility to document society and to preserve its images as a matter of historical record. It is clear that the emerging electronic technologies provide new challenges to the integrity of photographic images. This technology enables the manipulation of the content of an image in such a way that the change is virtually undetectable. In light of this we, the National Press Photographers Association, reaffirm the basis of our ethics: accurate representation is the benchmark of our profession.

We believe the photojournalistic guidelines for fair and accurate reporting should be the criteria for judging what may be done electronically to a photograph. Altering the content of a photograph, in any degree, is a breach of the ethical standards recognized by the NPPA.