Photographs of war are particular emotive but in civil society during peace time,
is there anything more a emotive than a football match in Spain.
In 2011 the Spanish sports newspaper AS digitally altered a photograph, removing
a defender from reportage of a match between Athletic Bilbao and Barcelona.
By removing the player, it appeared that, no offside had taken place.
This could be quite a critical issue. In this case, it seems a trivial matter
to falsify. But clearly, someone thought it was
important to play to their particular audience at the time.
All right, you may consider a football match reasonably mundane.
But let's go back to the Middle East and a photograph from 2006.
Which shows the aftermath of an Israeli air attack on Lebanon.
This was circulating through, Reuters news agency.
And after a while it became apparent that the image had been doctored.
That additional black smoke. Had been added.
And the sky image had been actually doctored to make the aftermath of the
attack look more dramatic and more severe.
again this is an embarrassment for Reuters, who reacted to it quite
strongly. and they said that it represented a
serious breach of their standards. Now, we have the best of interests of
photographers and news agencies to portray a particular event in a
particular light. Clearly, it was felt this one went too
far. Another way of augmenting an image to
make it more impressive is to digitally duplicate the audience, the crowd, had a
political uprising. This photograph from January of 2012 has
the crowds increased in number to make it look like there was a larger protest than
was the case. Again, this was discovered by readers who
posted up their own photographs showing the actual crowd in attendance.
Now, the website Four and Six has literally hundreds of examples of where
photo manipulation has been either proven or is strongly suspected.
And you can go through these at your own leisure.
To identify where changes had been made and for what purposes.
I'm going to reflect on one last one, which is a photograph of a family running
away from war torn Syria. it would appear that in this particular
image it is another composite, whereas in fact the original image showed no visible
damage behind the family. But for dramatic effect it was easier to
convey, a sense of what was going on by putting in a bombed-out background with a
family fleeing in front of it.