Wall Street Journal - April 2, 2003
War Photo Doctored in Field Shows New Ease of Technology
By MICHAEL J. MCCARTHY Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
A front-page Iraqi war photo in the Los Angeles Times on Monday had some eagle-eyed readers doing double-takes.
And Wednesday, the nation's fourth-largest newspaper published an extraordinary editor's note, saying it had fired a staff photographer for electronically doctoring the photo, a battlefield shot whose main image was a British soldier, arm outstretched, gesturing to seated Iraqi civilians.
After the photo appeared in three wide columns on the front page Monday, the editor's note said Wednesday "it was noticed that several civilians in the background appear twice." A close look reveals that images of certain people, squatting on the ground, show up in the photo just to the left -- and right -- of the soldier's legs.
The Los Angeles Times said it reached Brian Walski, a photographer for the paper since 1998, by phone in southern Iraq, and he admitted using his computer to splice together two photos, taken moments apart, to "improve the composition." A photo spread inside the paper Wednesday showed the two actual photos and the "altered photo," which mixed elements of the first two, which the paper initially published on Monday.
Fashion magazines have long touched up photos, and there have been periodic photo blow-ups in the past, as when National Geographic magazine moved a pyramid in a cover shot in the early 1980s and Time magazine subsequently darkened a mug shot of O.J. Simpson on its cover.
But today's digital technology makes it very easy to doctor photos, not just by photo editors but even by camera-toting journalists working in the field. Programs like Microsoft's Picture It and Adobe's Photoshop can be loaded onto a laptop, and they allow even amateurs to retouch this and resize that.
Photojournalists were stunned that a breaking news photo was electronically doctored. "If you can't believe what you see, everything is suspect," says Dirck Halstead, a former White House photographer for Time magazine and now a professor of photojournalism at the University of Texas in Austin. "There was a great deal of soul-searching by editors and photographers," following the pyramid and O.J. revelations, among others, he says. "And it was firmly established that any manipulation beyond what could be done in the dark room isn't permissible."
"This is a huge embarrassment to the industry," says John Long, a staff photographer for the Hartford Courant, which also carried the doctored photo on its front page. Like the Los Angeles Times, the Courant is owned by Tribune Co. It, too, subsequently carried the editor's note and the photo-essay showing the original photos that had been manipulated.
Mr. Long, who is also ethics chair of the National Press Photographers Association, has collected examples of altered photos over the years as part of a videotaped speech which the association circulates. It's called "Ethics in the Age of Digital Photography." As for the Iraq photo, Mr. Long says someone on the copy desk at the Hartford paper spotted "repeating people" after it had been published, and the paper alerted the Los Angeles Times.
The caption under the original photo in the paper said, "Warning: A British soldier manning the Azubayr Bridge orders fleeing Basra residents to hit the dirt as Iraqi forces opened fire."
In the editor's note, the Los Angeles Times said Mr. Walski used his computer to combine the left side of one photo and the right side of a second one. Some residents on the left side of the blended photo, it added, are visible twice. "Unless you examine the photo in detail, it's not really apparent," a spokeswoman for the paper said. She said John Carroll, editorof the Los Angeles Times, was flying cross-country Wednesday and not immediately available for comment.
The paper also said in the note its policy forbids altering the content of news photographs. Because of that violation, it said Mr. Walski was dismissed. Mr. Walski didn't respond to e-mails seeking comment, and the paper wouldn't provide his phone number.
Pondering the digital deception, Mr. Long and other photojournalists were crestfallen. "This sort of thing damages the credibility of all of us," he says. "Once you've lost your trust, you might as well be selling aluminum siding."