Associated Press severed its relationship with photographer Narciso Contreras after the news agency learned the Pulitzer prize-winning lensman manipulated a digital image of a Syrian rebel fighter by using software to remove a colleague’s (difficult to notice) video camera in the lower left corner of the frame, notes Grumpy Editor.
The action was taken after Santiago Lyon, AP’s vice-president and director of photography, said that while the alteration involved a portion of the image with little news importance, it breached AP’s requirements for truth and accuracy.
Grumpy Editor reminds that touching up photos once was a common practice with daily newspapers. The procedure was for photo editors to send black-and-white glossies to editorial artists where they would paint out “busy” backgrounds/foregrounds and eliminate wrinkles from faces of entertainers and other people in the news, among other tasks.
That routine included AP photos.
Nobody complained.
Also, photos were cropped to eliminate extraneous areas.
That, too, would be “shocking” today.
In the controversial image snapped last September by Contreras, a Mexican citizen, Lyon said AP’s “reputation is paramount and we react decisively and vigorously when it is tarnished by actions in violation of our ethics code. Deliberately removing elements from our photographs is completely unacceptable.”
See before and after images here:
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