By: PDN Online By all accounts, the first person to spot the digital alterations in Edgar Martins' now-withdrawn New York Times Magazine photo essay was a user named "unixrat" on the MetaFilter community site. Offline, his name is Adam Gurno, and he's a computer programmer in Minnesota.
Gurno was identified and interviewed yesterday by blogger Simon Owens at Bloggasm. Gurno explained how he spotted the signs of a mirror effect in one of Martins' photos in the online slide show:
"...I was looking at the shot with just the framing, the half done house, a shot from the inside. And right at the top there was this tiny bit of wood, and it sort of set off a little internal alarm. ? The angle on it seemed a bit unreal and it kind of made me say, ?I don?t know, I think these are kind of fake.? I kind of got the feeling it was. So I posted about it on Metafilter."
MetaFilter members started poking around and uncovering more suspicious evidence in Martins' photos. By the end of the day, The Times had withdrawn the essay from its Web site.
In its editors' note today, The Times doesn't say who first spotted the alterations, crediting only "a reader."
The Times' own Lens photo blog, to its credit, confronted the issue head-on in a post last night.
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Nielsen Business Media
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