Stockland Martel

Back in April, Stella Kramer stirred people up with her guest column on Adobe CS5‘s Content-Aware Fill feature, which enables users to alter images more easily than ever before. The issue was not that the feature itself didn’t work well.

“Think healing or cloning, but on steroids!” enthused PC Magazine after previewing Content-Aware Fill. “If you’re a photographer who works with Photoshop this tool is nothing short of life altering!”

The issue was that Content-Aware Fill worked too well.

“I don’t know how anyone is going to be able to trust photography at all anymore,” Stella wrote. “I know I won’t be able to tell that this has been done to a photograph. So what’s going to stop our history from being completely rewritten, with the photos to prove it!”

I thought of Stella when I read “Visa plans crackdown on Photoshop,” an article by Olivier Laurent in the British Journal of Photography. It seems that Jean-François Leroy, one of the founders of the international photojournalism festival Visa Pour l’Image, is planning to require the raw files of photographers submitting to next year’s fest.

“It drives me mad to see the amount of Photoshop manipulation there is now,” Leroy told the BJP.  “Juries have to be careful.

“For example,” he continued, “I’ve recently received a project on Afghanistan. It’s magnificent, but I personally think that without the diverse Photoshop filters used by the photographer, the images would have been even better. The framing of the action and of the subject was just perfect. He didn’t need to change anything in post-production. But now I can’t show these images at Visa. I just can’t.”

To some extent, Leroy is sympathetic to photojournalists who retouch their photos in hopes of winning a prize at a festival. The market for photojournalism is so meager, photojournalists have become desperate for income. The BJP recently addressed this very issue in “Clear-sighted Lunatics,” an interview with Karl Blanchet, founder of the online photojournalism magazine Lunatic.
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Is your magazine a sign of the times? eg photojournalists are finding it harder and harder to get their work published in mainstream media, or to get paid for their work, so they are turning to alternatives.

Karl: I am amazed and sad to see all of us suffer from the crisis. Our images are sold for the price of fruit while technological investments are more and more expensive. Much talent is not valued and that is really sad. Lunatic can’t pay photographers, but we have succeeded in selling at least half of the stories to magazines. My dream is to find enough sponsors to be able to buy the features we publish.
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Photoshop isn’t going anywhere, of course, nor should it. But like Leroy, I think it would be disappointing to see photojournalists giving their images plastic surgery to look more appealing to a select audience.

We’ve all accepted that a photojournalistic image is essentially a product of the photographer’s discretion and personal perspective; but it would be nice if we could trust that the content of the image itself is actual and not technologically shaped after the fact. When it comes to photojournalism, let’s keep it raw.

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Related: Aurora Now Has a Journalistic Search Filter, at aphotoeditor.com

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