great jump for a one legged basketball player…..

You’ve got Today, where as A.P.E. says, “retouching is ubiquitous anymore”, and then you’ve got these Magnum folks, who are still shooting away. I know times are changing, and celebrities rule the world, but you just have to view these 29 images, and think of the combined imagery of these people, and feel respect.

Paul Fusco’s picture of the RFK Funeral Train still sends chills up my spine, every time I see it.

http://blog.magnumphotos.com/ (Nov 1 post)

If you don’t know each of their work, just spend some time with Google, or on the Magnum site.

Sorry for the diversion. Now back to regular programming.

any skilled photog from the good ol’days knows you would shot an 4×5 or 8×10 tranny exactly as you wanted it to run in press.

It’s not that big of a deal, just knowing what you’re doing and taking the time to do it.

http://www.iphotocentral.com/Photos/csphoto_Images/Full/CS9598.jpg

http://bertc.com/three_crows.htm

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Israeli Death Metal… nice.

It’s a cute term, but personally, I’m tired of constantly being popped by politicians. Does it work in that context?

The same thing happens with CGI in film. People fly around and do amazing things, but you know it’s not real, so there’s no emotional impact.

Sometimes the best, most beautiful thing is the imperfections. The realness.

The perfect photos are fake, not cool. Every viewer can feel it even if the don’t express it. Perfectness weakens the medium and levels the playing field, so there’s no greatness rising above the crowd.

How else can you explain the great sales/reviews of Brittney Spears latest album?

Terry Richardson is a (literally) crappy photographer, but at least he’s real.

Maybe that explains his success in the plastic world of fashion.

Sure, it’s not held to the same standards as, say, war reportage, but the clothing is often reworked, from liquefy-ing a silhouette to shortening a hem to removing seams, wrinkles, tears & runs, zippers and all kinds of “alterations” to the clothing. In fact, fashion imagery generally is there to **sell** the clothing they’re featuring (sure it’s “editorial” but what do you think gets a particular company to advertise?)… to quote the NY Times’ policy, it’s not always “unmistakable to the reader”.

That said, I think the point of the original post was to illustrate that altered photos are as old as photography itself and about the NY Times’ selective enforcement of their “policy”. If you ask me, the NY Times photo policy is ridiculous for absolving burning, dodging and cropping. Those decisions alter the meaning of an image by the very virtue of being decisions of what information is included or excluded from an image.

Fact is, photography is never an “objective” medium so why behave as if it is?

http://tinyurl.com/2brja4

As far as the NY Times, it just gets dicey when, as you’re lying in bed on a Sunday morning, flipping the pages, and as you lie down the uncoated newsprint section, you leave one set of standards, and then you pick up The Magazine, and instantly, you walk into a whole other set of retouching standards. But both sections have the NYTimes logo in the Old English font, presumably, the same mindset.

You also have to watch for when they use fine artists (photographers), but they don’t clearly label the imagery as illustration. They simply credit it as “Photo by _____”, and leave it at that.

You just have to wonder how much of this is advertiser-driven, and the whole goal is “everything be perfect”, and the truth be damned. Could we not start with just a clearly written caption? “Hey, we swapped the heads. We trimmed her thighs with the Liquify Filter. We retouched the skin, (a lot). That background was never there; she was in a photo studio at Industria.” It might make someone think twice if they had to sit down and write the caption, listing everything done, knowing it was going to be published.

Personally, I like the policy, and use something like it myself – not as a rule so much, but as a general mindset. I may have removed a minor blemish *occasionally*, but the idea of reworking an image digitally kills the whole joy and point of photography for me.