Art and Photography IUB

Altering and Staging Photographs

December 4, 2009 at 9:08 PM (Uncategorized)

According to the NPPA code of ethics, photojournalists should never alter photographs, but different people have different definition to what exactly altering a photograph is.

Some believe that altering photographs includes toning a photograph and color balancing it.  Others believe that altering a photograph is changing the original context of what the photographs displays, included adding or removing objects in the photograph.

For me personally, altering a photograph is adding or removing content.  Sometimes in digital photography and in film photography, photographs may be overexposed or underexposed.  It happens to even the best photographers of all times.  A photographer might then burn or dodge a photograph in the darkroom to make it the best it can be, or a digital photograph may be made lighter or darker.  Is that altering a photograph?

My answer is no.  People have been burning and dodging photographs since darkroom photography was invented.  Lightening or darkening photographs digitally is the same, even though some do not agree.

Another ethical code the NPPA clearly states is no photojournalist may stage a photograph.

Well if that is the case, is portrait photography for photojournalist’s staged?  The photojournalist wants the subject to be in a portrait style and sometimes have to tell the subject to change facial expressions.  Is that staging then?

My answer is of course no.  Telling someone how to hold their face is not staging a photograph.  It is simply helping the photograph being the best it can be.  If a photographer was to add props or create a background, then of course that is staging.

One magazine that went against the code of ethics was National Geographic with their cover of the pyramids.  The pyramids would not fit into a vertical format of the cover, so they moved them closer together through digital manipulation.  That is one hundred percent against NPPA code of ethics.

There are only a few exceptions to these rules that I agree with.  If a photograph that is being taken is not by a photojournalists but rather a studio photographer, then altering and staging is okay.  They are not trying to tell a factual news story through a photograph, but rather expressing their own style of photography.