I was at the event were the image was taken last Tuesday, and I saw this:
What’s In A Flip?
So the image by Merle was flipped for publication — by accident or for some purpose I can’t fathom. (It didn’t change the visual impact of the layout.) What’s the big deal? Not much, really, was my thought when I noticed the flip. Then again, manipulating images goes against journalistic standards. So, the Clarín’s version of the event is a lie, at worst, or at best, inaccurate reporting.
Either way, it’s another simple, clear example of how you don’t need Photoshop to manipulate images.
As my picture proves (if you believe this is what I really saw) Congresswoman María Luisa Storani was sitting to the right of Human Rights Watch’s Marianne Mollman (center), and not to the left, as the Clarín image proposes.
The person who shared this OK Go“This Too Shall Pass” music video with me wrote simply, “Someone learned his physics well.” As I watched the video — utterly entranced, wondering where I could get my hands on a few thousand dominoes — I had to agree.
Understanding physics certainly would be important for getting all these gadgets to go off just right, so perfectly. Clearly, this is for real, I was thinking. This is really happening in front of me. This is not a product of postproduction wizardry.
Maybe I was wrong about that, I realized. But then, it really didn’t matter.
The mechanical wonders in this video feel and so they are real. I believe in the magic of a magician who performs wonderfully, even though I know he is just performing a “trick.” The real trick, which is the magic, is that I feel and believe what I am seeing, regardless of what I might be thinking.
A couple weeks ago I saw the traveling World Press Photo ’08 exhibit on display here in Buenos Aires. A fan of the yearly photojournalism contest, I was quite surprised by my reaction to the experience. It was the first time I had seen World Press Photo in person, and I was stunned by the photojournalists’ incredibly diverse and extreme postproduction practices.
Journalistic photography has never been as so-called “objective” as the general public tends to think. From selective cropping to the so-called “hand of god” burning and dogging techniques used by traditional black and white newspaper shooters, photographers have been employing postproduction techniques to better tell their stories since long before the advent of digital. As photographers, we are well aware of this.
