A bitter debate is underway between American journalists and photojournalists over an image published in front page from the Washington Post to mark the 14th anniversary of the crash of an Air Florida plane on the XNUMXth Street bridge. The photo captures the bridge over the Potomac River, in the red light of the sunset; in the upper left, against the background of a blue sky, an airplane passes.
Photographer Bill O'Leary deserves an award, this image is so beautiful. But the caption that the Post has published warns readers that it is a "composite" photo, made with HDR (high dynamic range), a technology soon available on many digital cameras, which allows you to combine shots in a single image made at different times. Basically, the photographer put the camera on the tripod and photographed the bridge, then waited for a plane to fly by and took a new image, then waited for the sunset and took another shot. HDR did the rest, editing the photos to portray an event (the passage of a plane over the bridge at sunset) that never happened that day.
The custodians of professional ethics immediately rose up: if technology is allowed to distort reality, where will good journalism based on the narration of the facts as they happened, without manipulations? The National Association of Photojournalists' code of ethics prohibits the use of technologies such as HDR and requires photographers and photo editors to respect the integrity of the moment. “By combining different images – said Sean Elliot, president of the association – the Washington Post has created an image that does not exist. The aircraft visible in the final product was not there when the other photos were taken and this raises many questions about the validity of the published image”.
Frank Niemeir, an independent photographer, argued in an interview with the Poynter Institute for Journalism that if this is the case, throw away all 24mm or 600mm lenses, since the human eye has a visual angle of only 45mm: each photo will be taken with a 50mm. “Even black and white will be banned, to respect the colors of reality. The flashes will also be eliminated, which make things visible in the dark that are not visible and it will not be possible to set shooting sensitivity that exceeds that of the retina. Even if modern machines are equipped with very advanced functions, we will have to go back to the old ethical values of the 50s".
Between the two extremes, there is obviously a possible mediation, as the Poynter Institute itself has indicated. Giving up the possibilities offered by technology would be absurd, but misrepresenting reality is a violation of the relationship of trust that is created between a newspaper and its reader. The important thing is that the reader is always informed of the validity and correspondence to reality of what he is seeing. If a photo has been retouched or is the result of a combination of different images, you should always tell them. As did the Washington Post.
