Retouched photos, changed impressions
I’ve been reacquainting myself with Photoshop lately, that great application that lets you and Fox News do creepy things like this (a manipulated photo of a reporter at the New York Times) 
and it begs to be said: it’s so easy to manipulate a photo. I, who am unable to draw a straight line with a ruler, could have made Jacques Steinberg look even uglier; hell, with Adobe’s infamous “charisma filter,” you can give Obama the impression of being quite similar to Rush Limbaugh.
I have a few photographer friends, and they’re constantly tweaking their photos, post-production, aiming for aesthetic excellence. Some of these revisions are technical, like changing the color levels to more clearly see a face, or cropping out unwanted scenery. But how much of a photo do you have to change to bend the truth? After the New York Times got wind that Edgar Martins, a Portuguese photojournalist they’d hired to document halted construction projects, had digitally altered the photos, they took them down. You can still see his unnatural love of symmetry here, here and here; there’s a great discussion of it all on Metafilter.
I applaud the New York Times for its decision, but can’t help but wonder about all of the photos that fall through the cracks: journalists are notorious watchdogs of other journalists, but rarely do any trained eyes with a public format scrutinize visual media in such a way; when they do, we find out about Reese Witherspoon’s changing face, not photos of everyday events. But why would anyone accept a photograph that’s been altered at all, and why does that seem so much less heinous than altered quotes or statistics?
Ubiquitous photos and videos have made people demand them (it’s the “I call BS unless you give me photos” syndrome), but most people don’t seem to realize how easy it is to alter them. And how quickly we form first impressions: we only need to see a face for 100 milliseconds before drawing a conclusion about it, and our first impressions are overgeneralized, even though we know we shouldn’t. Is there any hope for us at all?
