Reportage (Reporting the News)

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En provenance du cours de University of London

Film, Images & Historical Interpretation in the 20th Century: The Camera Never Lies

63 notes

University of London

Film, Images & Historical Interpretation in the 20th Century: The Camera Never Lies

63 notes

This course is a short taster on the topic of the use of Images, Film, and their use in historical interpretation in the 20th century. It is primarily provided for those who have a general interest in history that draws on photojournalism as primary evidence, and films based on historical events. Once you have completed this course we hope you will be equipped to: Appreciate the significance of photographs as historical evidence in the twentieth century. Understand the limitations of the medium, and how we can attribute meaning to these individual records of 'one moment in time' while taking into account the circumstances in which any particular image was taken. Understand how individuals and institutions have looked to manipulate images to their own ends – through alteration and/or censorship – and what that meant to contemporary interpretation, as well as subsequent historical interpretation. Put individual images into a wider context, and in particular with reference to history written, or portrayed, beyond academia: public history. Do be aware that part of the contents of this course regard images and depiction of war. Real wars and real images.

À partir de la leçon

Introduction

We will explore the issues associated with the use of images as a source for historical research and consider a number of examples where image manipulation has been uncovered

Introduction0:42

Use of Images7:23

Manipulation2:14

The Image in Politics5:25

Advertising5:07

Reportage (Reporting the News)4:38

Optional Extra Material - other forms of images - Guernica14:35

Rencontrer les enseignants

Dr Emmett Sullivan
Senior Tutor
History Department, Royal Holloway, University of London

Now, advertisers, politicians, manipulating images.

That's one thing. My principal concern, as I mentioned

earlier, is what happens when we have reportage, or things purporting to be

reported. Again, 2003, we have a photograph from

Basra. in this case.

It shows a British soldier apparently gesturing to Iraqi civilians allegedly so

that they take cover. And these appeared on the front page of

the Los Angeles Times. It's a composite photograph.

it actually is two photographs which have been morphed together and the veteran

photographer who took this photograph was fired as a result of his decision to use

two, rather than one shot. It may have improved the composition.

But did nothing for his professional career.

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.

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