When photos become pictures

An interesting story came to light last week about the White House News Photographers Association 'Eyes of History' competition, and a winner being disqualified for tampering with their submission.

The original winning entry was recognised by eagle-eyed staff at The Washington Post and when they notified the prize givers the award was retracted. The reason? The image had been heavily manipulated from the original picture that had itself appeared in print previously without the manipulations.

The story is well covered elsewhere so we won't attempt to do that here. It did however raise some interesting debate in the office as to what extent post-processing is acceptable, and if so is there a limit to which the processing should affect the overall image.

In simple terms, the manipulated image is almost certainly going to be the better image aesthetically and probably always will be. This should be no surprise, as the photographer (and let's assume the same person processes the picture) has little or no motive to process an image in any way that would detract from the picture.

And it is nothing new. It is very common to tinker with the colour balance of an image, or to add light to a picture in processing. This is not the reserve of the digital photography age but has been very much a part of photo processing for many many years.

However, the extent to which the image in this instance was manipulated served not only to emphasise features in the picture, but in this case it served to remove entire elements of the picture - in this case a person, a match official, who was there had been removed or subdued to the extent that they were no longer visible in the image.

Under the rules of the competition, this was not acceptable. And although Glopho as a news network wants these true to life images, there is still a place for the more artistic representation of events that can be improved at the hands of the processing lab or, more commonly these days, some picture editing software.

In essence, the true to life photographic representation of events that we look for in our news, and which the competition in this case demanded, are what is required to ensure veracity of any images being reported and circulated as truths. The artistic representation is a discipline with equal merit, but they do have to live in separate worlds, and in many respects kept apart to preserve the integrity of both.