You’re called in by your managing editor at the newspaper where you work as a staff photographer. Boss says, “It’s come to our attention that you altered a photograph that was printed in the paper”. You say, “Opps, that was just a mistake, I accidently sent you the photo I was going to use for my personal use”.

Then you quit your job. Why? Because you know that pretty soon the floor is gonna collapse, and everyone will know about all the other times before this incident when you apparently made that same ‘mistake’.

Fiction? Nope; truth. And it’s about ‘truth’ that got this photographer in trouble. You see, newspaper photographers are journalists. Photo-Journalists. It’s their job to present reality accurately for the sake of the readers, and the trust that the readers have that what they are seeing hasn’t been tampered with. That’s a pretty straight forward ethics issue – found shots only. No Alterations, period. Not even to clone out the doggy poop on the sidewalk. You don’t “clean up” news images, and you don’t certainly never, ever, ever, add things that weren’t in front of the lens.

Read about the poor staff photographer for the Toledo Blade that is no longer a staff photographer. The story also has links to original and altered images that were published.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 11:31 pm and is filed under Newsworthy, Photo Business. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.