(from Canada.com web archive)
On my computer screen, a picture pops up, one of a few thousand that stream into the Post's photo department daily. In the photo, reproduced on this page, a Palestinian man clutches his automatic rifle, aiming at an unseen target, while an old woman looks on.
Just another gritty war scene from the Middle East? Not quite. A few awkward details pique my interest: (1) the woman is casually leaning against a doorframe amidst what purports to be a gunfight; (2) the fighter holds the rifle unnaturally high, so as to conveniently hide his face from the camera; (3) the rifle's butt-end, designed to brace snugly in the shoulder joint, is held at an odd angle. Had he fired the weapon from that position, the gun's recoil would have bruised him, and the rifle might even have kicked him in the face.
All of this convinced me the photo was staged. As an additional bit of evidence, the text in the caption provided says the Islamic Jihad gunman "holds his weapon" after an Israeli attack. From experience, I know that phrases such as this are used as euphemisms for the obvious: The guy is posing for the camera.
Such a photo should never make it into mass-circulated press agency databases. But, as in this case, they do. And too often, naive photo editors end up publishing them.
A staged picture such as this must pass at least two filters before it reaches the newspaper. First, it should have been eliminated by the photographer under scrutiny of his own professional conscience. Failing that, the photo should have been disposed of by an editor at the agency that received the photo.
From my own experience as a war photographer, I know that sometimes it's impossible to avoid people posing for the camera. But that doesn't mean those images have to end up in a newspaper: Whenever confronted with posing combatants aiming their guns at an imaginary enemy, I would dutifully take a few pictures, thank them and dispose of those pictures at the earliest opportunity.
It is odd the way people will change their behaviour in the presence of cameras. On one occasion I remember well, I encountered a family of Bosnian Muslim refugees from the besieged town of Srebrenica. The family members were all wailing -- partly from the sorrow of losing all their belongings during their flight, and partly from the relief of having escaped Srebrenica with their lives. Tears were pouring down their faces until I pointed the camera. Like magic, they all flashed smiles in unison. The result was a bizarre photograph: While I had not deliberately staged it, the discordance between context and facial expression made the shot look artificial.
While intentionally staging a photo is forbidden by the profession's code of ethics, there is more ambiguity about situations in which the subject stages it on his own accord. But even putting ethics to one side, this phenomenon can cause problems.
A rookie photographer I know, for instance, visited the frontline trenches in the Balkans during the early 1990s. It was a quiet, slow day. Much like the photographer who took the above-cited Palestinian photo, this young rookie was eager to get a combat shot. Eventually, a soldier said to him: "Hey, get a picture of me shooting," and, without waiting, pulled the trigger. Caught by surprise, the photographer missed the initial burst of fire. Moreover, he spent the next several hours crawling in the mud on his belly, hiding from the barrage of enemy fire that came in reply. Such are the perils of bringing out the ham in trigger-happy combatants.
The pre-digital generations of war journalists, dubbed the "war romanticists," guarded their reputations zealously. They were thrill-seekers, to be sure. But they were not cavalier about ethics. Indeed, they considered themselves "documentarists," and took pride in the fact that they never doctored their pictures or staged their subjects.
With the rise of digital photography, barriers to entry fell in the profession: Anyone could call himself a photojournalist, pick up a camera, and e-mail photos to editors around the world. The cost-cutting media increasingly relies on these cheap, sometimes unscrupulous, local stringers. In some cases, they flout professional objectivity, and take sides in the conflict they cover. In other cases, they stage pictures to keep employers happy. Or worse, they manipulate digital pictures after the fact, turning a photo into a work of fiction.
Sometimes, even staff photographers get tempted. Brian Walski, a staff photographer for the Los Angeles Times was in Iraq in 2003. He sent many great pictures from that assignment. However, he will be remembered for the one picture that cost him his job. In an act he describes as "temporary professional insanity," Walski manipulated a photo by combining elements of two digital photographs on his computer. The picture was used in two newspapers from the Times' chain. A day later, a technician discovered irregularities in the digital file and alerted Walski's editor. Walski admitted the manipulation and was fired.
Other cases are more ambiguous, but also troubling. In January, 2006, for instance, The New York Times and Time magazine published an AFP photo of Pakistani tribesmen in the ruins of a house allegedly bombed by U.S. aircraft. In the picture, reproduced on this page, the tribesmen stand by an unexploded bomb which allegedly hit the house. However, military analysts proved that the bomb in the picture was of Pakistani origin, and nothing like it is used by the U.S. military. The claim makes the authenticity of the picture questionable. (AFP says that the photograph, if staged, was staged by the tribesmen, not the photographer.)
The "romantic" days of war photography are gone. The likes of Robert Capa, who in 1954 stepped on a land mine in Vietnam and died while searching for a better camera angle, are now only names in history books. The rest of us, stuck in the era of high speed Internet, short attention span and general mistrust, will have to rely on our own common sense to separate the real from the fake.
(Zoran Bozicevic is associate photo editor at the National Post.)
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