Care to expand a bit on you mentioned in your post ? Don’t get it. Have a nice Friday :)…

But nonetheless, I think it’s the NYT’s responsibility to manage guest artists and conclusively resolve issues before stuff is published. I have a hard time believing the NYT folks were blindsided by the image in question.

Also, where does post processing end and Photoshopping begin? Most people (maybe other than PJs) make some tweaks to their images in Photoshop. I’ll bet you could ask 100 photographers the question and get very different answers for when fixing flaws ends and image fabrication starts. I’m not defending Martins, but it’s possible in his mind he had not crossed a line, but the blogosphere and NYT might see things differently.

Again, I think this all works back to a lack of a well-defined, consistently-applied policy at the NYT.

artist is FOS; not uncommon.

I wish they had hired a young American photographer, who lived in or near one of those foreclosure doomed towns, to shoot these lost and failed homes.

Odd how he is somewhere with no access to the WWW, yet he manages to send that email out to everyone who replies. Absolutely ! [Unless he put that as his auto-responder?] The first lie is the hardest…..

I get what the fuss is all about; but by the same token is it really such a big deal. OK maybe he lied, but he probably just feels what he is doing equals his Photographic Vision. Next you won’t be able to use a coloured filter on B&W to alter the tones. I mean thats OK isn’t it?

And for those of you who want ‘Truth in Fashion’, Fashion = Fantasy. Enough said.

I saw his work years ago and that claim of no manipulation…? Well, regarding those beach photos let’s just say I have never in my life seen night skies that black, even near the horizon, and I’ve been to places where there is no light pollution. I have also taken long exposure photographs on beaches at night and have never had results like that – similar, but with such contrast between a pitch black sky and bright foreground, without some post production manipulation or a big set of lights? Never. How he does it I do not know, maybe he does use a lot of lights (and possibly a big black cloth as well). In any case, I remember when I saw them that I thought they were so obviously constructed (including some selective printing/photoshop) they actually lost their interest for me. This kind of manipulation he is accused of is fine in the art world, but this was not presented as an art series, and as per the NY Times guidelines, if they had known they were manipulated (which it seems they did not) they should have been labeled as such. It will be interesting to see how he responds to the accusations. Maybe we should ask him about his ‘Topologies’ book at the same time…

A true artist’s reputation, on the other hand, using their own hand in the MAKING of a something NEW, rises or falls based on their singular hand-wrought effort. Their work is clearly evident in what their HANDS have made.

The photographic medium with all it’s increasing peripheral ’software’ has so radically changed over the past 10 years that the actual veracity and integrity of ANY OF IT is highly suspect now.

How ironic that the medium once tooted as the best ‘documentary’ vehicle of ‘realism’ undercuts it’s own strength by its insatiable appetite to ‘conquer’ – and control – art.

I applaud what the French students did, but trying to sneak things through until caught red handed- it’s been done, like every damn day in every possible endeavor imaginable…

Look at the work carefully now and you will see it can be created no other way than through digital manipulation. This link has something on that
http://www.mexicanpictures.com/headingeast/2009/07/edgar-martins.html

Also I found one image from his Topologies book which has obviously cloned rocks in the lower left. http://themorningnews.org/archives/galleries/topologies/

The question I find fascinating is why he had to disavow digital manipulation. He’s an art photographer and needed forgo it if he likes. Because of his misrepresentation he’s embarrassed the Times. Yes they should have looked into it carefully, but it’s amazing how your eyes can be fooled when you are told something that is one thing is another. I think it’s the re contextualization of his work as being in the Times Magazine that exposed him to an audience that was less familiar with him, the world of art photography and more familiar with PhotoShop that saw through his claim.

See our email exchange via my blog:
http://www.jainlemos.com/?p=665

Read every comment :)

I don’t know if it is a full web based app yet but there is http://www.detouch.org/

That might be the software Rob was referring to.

If you look at Martins Web site, he uses the same reflected image technique in a number of his projects. It’s part of his style. And it’s pretty obvious that type of symmetry rarely occurs naturally. Hence it seems clear that when the NYT hired Martins to shoot this project, they must have been aware that some of his work involves digital alteration (unless, of course, the editors at the NYT are both clueless and blind).

Presumably Martins was hired because the NYT wanted his creative perspective on the topic. The NYT has a cadre of excellent staff photographers; any one of which could have handled this assignment. So it’s curious why the NYT would hire Martins then forbid him to exercise his creative style. It’s even more curious why Martins would accept a high-visibility assignment if he were not comfortable with the ground rules. And why would the NYT publish Martins’ images if there was any suspicion they might be alterations? Seriously, if you look at the image in question, do you really believe that it wasn’t altered? Any responsible editor would either pull the questionable shots, or hold the article until there was conclusive proof that it was not altered — i.e. “take me to this site, I want to see it myself.”

It sure feels like the digital alteration issue wasn’t an issue until it became a topic in the blogosphere.

As I said before, I think all this stems from the lack of a well-defined, and consistently enforced, policy by the NYT on the use of digitally-altered images. It’s a little disappointing that the NYT would throw Martins under a bus as soon as some criticism started to make the rounds on the Internet. I’m not sure what the internal political climate is like at the NYT right now, but it feels like it might not be good.

Tom