My highlights below.
…what McCurry has done with a couple of his pictures that are being shown around.
Taking a figure out of the children's soccer picture. Nope. Kids games are
supposed to be messy, chaotic, noisy, and include kids running themselves to exhaustion, particularly in the (warm) tropical rain. I think the picture
loses impact by having one figure removed. I only wish I had a pic like this of my kids and the neighbors kids playing in similar circumstances. Oh dear, I must get out into the rain more.
Much the same goes for the cyclo-whatever pic. He has had a lot of work done to the background to empty the street. Huh? Aren't Indian streets
supposed to be pretty busy places? That has removed appeal from the pic for me.
BUT the most important thing with that picture is he has removed two of the four passengers aboard the cyclo-whatsit. Why is the operator off the thing and pushing hard along the road? I actully asked that question in my head when I first saw the picture. A level road. Pushing? So hard but clearly not running? That;s wrong, I thought.
Then I saw the
original. Ah! Light dawned!
The poor bloke is doing struggling because the cyclo-whatsit is overloaded and he cannot pedal it with four people on it!
Rickshaw, probably
I see what you mean. To me, the effect is opposite. Visually intruding elements are removed, and the message becomes clearer.
The next bit is getting a bit philosophical, and maybe tangential to some, but to me at the core of the whole brouhaha. So be warned
The funny thing here is that you are reacting to what you think reality is
supposed to be. You are applying a filter (see below). You actually don't know which of the images is the original.
Was something added or was something removed? It could be either. (*)
You judge that something was removed based on how
you think these things in reality are supposed to be.
So in end-effect you are interpreting reality.
Obviously, I concur that it is most likely that something was removed from the images. I've been to India, too
And Occam's razor says that removal is more likely than addition. But it is based on my idea, my memory of how it is there. And less on actual reality.
(*) closer examination of the image will likely reveal what actually was done - removal or addition. But that's not the point. The point is that you and I are using
supposed to be as basis for our conclusions.
McCurry had killed the picture -- removing the very reason for it.
I do care about stuff like that (I was a journalist for a long time).
Now raise your hand and solemnly swear that as a journalist you ever only reported the sole, purely objective truth, that you never, ever selected from reality to show the world as you saw it?
If you can do that, we need to get the Pope on the line immediately, because we have found a living saint, that rarest of beasts.
OK, a living saint is probably more in the bailiwick of the Dalai Lama but I am sure you get the gist...
And no, this is not an attack on your journalistic ethos. It is solely to point out that a human being cannot reproduce reality unfiltered. And neither can a camera.
Filters
are there. They are unavoidable; they are built-in to the human cognitive apparatus. The true question is in recognising them.
To me it's clear that photo-journalists doing editorial work should be really, really careful not to distort reality. It is also clear - to me - that to reduce that to a near biblical
thou shalt not manipulate your images after the shot falls short of what it is actually about. There is more to it. And a solely literal interpretation of the commandment is not the whole truth.
Regards, Mike
