Altering Photographs in Photojournalism

By: Amanda Sena and Haley Hickey

Summary:

In early years, the faking of photographs was done either through stage direction by the photographer or through darkroom manipulation. These days, however, photographic faking has taken on a whole different dimension, as images can be digitized and manipulated, appearing seamless to the naked eye.

One example of early staged photography is Roger Fenton’s two versions of “Valley of the Shadow of Death,” depicting the aftermath of a battle during the Crimean War in 1855. The first version has no cannonballs in the middle of the road, while the second has many cannonballs strewed across by Fenton to create a more graphic image.

Darkroom manipulation was very popular among dictators, as they often airbrushed their enemies out of their photographs. In the 1930s, Joseph Stalin removed a commissar from one of his photos after the commissar fell out of favor with him.

Today, digital manipulation has been used in many publications, where with a few clicks of a button, an image can be changed completely. In Vanity Fair’s 2007 “Africa Issue,” only two of the 20 different covers by Annie Leibovitz are real, while the others are composites, including the one of Oprah Winfrey and George Clooney.

Some photographers have even lost their jobs for manipulating photos, including Brian Walski, who was fired by the Los Angeles Times in 2003 for creating a composite of two different images he took. Both were of a British soldier in Basra, gesturing to Iraqi civilians to seek cover shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Walski combined the two to “improve” the composition.