Pictures At An Exhibition

I'm a little late to the party with this, but I wanted to comment on the conservosphere's latest scalp collection, namely the revelation that a Reuters stringer was doctoring photos to make them appear more ominous, including a particularly awful use of the Photoshop clone stamp. I'm about as amateur as they get when it comes to Photoshop and I think I could have done a better job.

I do feel like the story, and the plaudits in the press for Little Green Footballs, the all-Islamohysteria all-day-long site that is credited with the revelation, happened in something of a vaccuum. The best photography site on the Web, by a wide margin, especially when you're talking about the psychological impact of photojournalism, is BAGNewsNotes. And they have an interesting thesis about the motivations of Adnan Hajj, the Reuters photographer in question:

If there are points of agreement between the photographers and the wingnuts (including the belief that Hajj's excuse -- that he was simply trying to "eliminate dust" -- was ridiculous), the photogs are as amazed as reticent as to why the act occurred. Of course, the right wingers want to believe that Hajj is a Hezbollah sympathizer and, thus, was somehow darkening the photo to make it more foreboding. If that's true, however, that still doesn't explain why Hajj would execute this particularly awkward and bone-headed retouch. (Well, the experts and checkers at Reuters who approved the pic might object to the "bone headed" reference, since they were none the wiser until the Rathergate crowd caught it, and flipped out.)

Along those lines, the most telling piece of information that came out of the Sportshooter discussion was the theory that perhaps Hajj wanted to be caught.

As a clinician, I have been taught that you follow the data, no matter where it leads, how weird it seems, or how divergent it is from your best (or favorite) hypothesis. I've had a bit of a chance now to look over these shots and check out various other Hajj pics appearing recently in various media. I've also taken a little survey of Hajj's work in the YN thread over the past four weeks. I don't have a good explanation for the "why" either, but I wonder if the "motive" might be as much psychological as political.

Maybe you'll think I'm crazy -- once you hear this -- but it's possible Hajj might have been obsessed with smoke.

He's got a sample of 11 of Hajj's photos taken over a two-week span, all of which foreground smoke. And practically all of the captions contain the phrase "Smoke rises..." It's really kind of an interesting hypothesis and not entirely at odds with the right wingers. The guy has possibly become so shell-shocked by burning rubble and smoke that he thought enhancing it would be the ultimate act of propaganda - when in fact his retouched photo doesn't really make the scene look any worse than it did before.

Michael Shaw, lead blogger at BAGNewsNotes, also quotes a photographer friend at the Huffington Post, who writes that the photos at Qana - which have also come into question by the conservosphere - display a particular trait of Middle Eastern society, namely the deliberate staging of photos:

Much of the debate about "staging" in Qana can be deflated a good deal by an appreciation of cultural differences. Among many Middle Eastern Muslims the display of the dead is very much a ritual part of dealing with death. Palestinian funeral parades, with or without media present, are a demonstration of this. While the display of the dead may appear callous and disrespectful to many western eyes, it is likely interpreted as a form of honor among those who actually display the dead - an attempt to give meaning to something senseless.

Photographing the display is not necessarily deceiptful, but rather an honest record of the extraordinary ways people react in these terrible circumstances. And a rescueworker displaying a body does not a Media Mogul the rescue worker make. He/She is still a rescue worker. Though the caption for pictures from that portion of the event should read "Rescue workers display the body of..." rather than "Rescue workers remove the body of..."

Appreciating cultural differences has never been their strong suit.

And neither has appreciating the fact that propaganda in war is a tool used pretty much universally since time immemorial. What's interesting, however, is how the stakes don't have to be as high as war for the photo-doctoring to come out on the Republican side of the aisle in America. It merely has to be a threatened loss of power.



You'll notice the clever shading on Howard Dean's upper lip. Here's the undoctored photo:



And before you think that this is just reading a Hitler moustache into nothing, you'll notice that GOP.com, where the image was hosted, quickly changed the photo once anyone found out.

So the idea that a few extra wisps of smoke planted in a photo is completely unprecedented, whether within wartime or without, strikes me as a bit myopic.

See also Eric Boehlert for a different perspective on this story.