In Defense of War Photographers

By: Greg Mitchell With most others in the mainstream media silent, I rise here in support of the overwhelming number of press photographers in the Middle East who bravely, under horrid conditions, in recent weeks have sent back graphic and revealing pictures from the war zones, only to be smeared, as a group, by rightwing bloggers aiming, as always, to discredit the media as a whole.

This broad condemnation, and the conspiracy theories, lodged against photographers in war zones -- who are risking their lives while bloggers risk nothing but carpal tunnel syndrome -- needs to be refuted.

Indeed, one American photographer in Lebanon, Bryan Denton, often cited by the blogs as backing their claims, has now qualified his earlier "irresponsible" assertions at the Lightstalkers site, and stated flatly, "Any one out there who is trying to politicize that is just plain sick, and is moving this further away from the real issue at hand. There are hundreds of photographers working here now. Don't let a few bad apples take the attention away from what the REAL story is, because by the looks of the blogs, THAT is exactly what is happening." Don't expect to find those second thoughts on many of the blogs.

Which is not to say that this is much ado about nothing. Obviously, Adnan Hajj, the Reuters photographer who doctored at least two images, deserved to be dismissed. A handful of other pictures snapped by others warrant investigation. In a few cases, caption information was wrong or misleading, and required correction. In addition, the controversy has sparked an overdue discussion -- some of it here at E&P -- on the credibility of all photography in the Photoshop age and the wide use of local stringers abroad in a time of cutbacks in supervision.

But, in general, the charges against the photographers, and their news organizations, have been hysterical, largely unfounded, and politically driven, while at times raising valid questions, such as what represents "staging."

Time does not permit a point by point documentation of the dozens of ludicrous, or at least completely unproven, examples of doctored or staged or otherwise manipulated photos on the Web. Have no fear, I will soon return to this subject, but in the meantime, feel free to plunge into the blogosphere. If you go deeply enough, you may feel you are back on the Grassy Knoll. One of the most-linked sites in this controversy, EU Referendum, goes so far as to suggest that a kind of Hollywood "film-set" was improvised at the site of the Qana killings "for the benefit of both Hezbollah and the media."

Many of the blogs routinely refer to The New York Times, AP, CNN and other news organizations as being in league with Hezbollah or at least "anti-American." Rush Limbaugh declared that "photographers are obviously willing to participate in propaganda. They know exactly what's being done, all these photos.... So the point is, Israel is probably not even killing all these civilians."

Just this morning, a blogger emailed me his latest "scoop." Remember those photos a few days ago showing "Made in USA" signs posted here and there amid the rubble of South Beirut? This fellow is convinced that an AP photog wrote the signs, in a certain font, on his computer -- and pasted them into his image.

One problem with the theory: E&P happens to have photos taken by others that show exactly the same thing ? but the blogger will no doubt now claim that all of these highly competitive photogs conspired on this.

Often, the allegations of bogus photos amounts to nothing more than this: Showing, say, one picture of a badly-damaged car in Lebanon next to another shot of a totally destroyed auto, both said to be hit by Israeli bombs. Aha! Obviously the one that was only badly-damaged must have gotten wrecked in some other way. The possibility that one vehicle suffered a direct hit and the other a glancing blow -- or that different Israeli missiles were used -- apparently does not occur to these people.

One day last week I spent an entertaining ten minutes examining a long thread at one blog in which many posters were convinced that, for some unfathomable reason, a very dark-skinned Lebanese man in one photo MUST have been pasted into the scene -- for one reason, everyone know (?) Arabs are never that dark.

Keep in mind, in considering all of these charges, that almost without exception, the bloggers are basing their comments on photos posted on the Web in compressed jpeg form, with little true detail possible. So when they write, for example, about people or props being "planted" at the site of an explosion -- the only evidence for this being the apparent lack of dust on their surface -- remember that sharp detail and true surface texture are not visible in Web photos.

Here's just one typical example of blog hysteria in their attacks on what some of them call "fauxtography."

An image captured by one of The New York Times' most acclaimed photographers, Tyler Hicks, that appeared in the paper and in a gallery at its Web site, showed a young man being pulled from the wreckage of a collapsed building after the Israeli attack on Qana that killed at least 28, including 16 or more children. Eagled-eyed bloggers soon found, on other news sites, images of the same man darting about the same disaster scene, trying to rescue people.

So, in their usual manner, they put 1 and 1 together and got 2 much: One blog after another charged that this man, after doing his rescue work, was planted on the pile, as a bomb victim, by Hezbollah, probably with the cooperation of Tyler Hicks, who then sent the manipulated photo around the world. The Times, as usual, was denounced by the rightwing bloggers for pro-terrorist and/or anti-American bias.

Even the popular, non-political site Gawker joined in, under the headline, "Times War Photos Artfully Staged, Directed."

Well, there was, indeed, something wrong with the Times presentation. On the Web, though not in print, it suggested that the man had been blasted in the Israeli attack. In fact, the Times quickly found out -- and corrected its Web caption -- that the man fell down and got hurt in his rescue efforts. This simple explanation for the chronology was too much for some of the bloggers who continued questioning the incident, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Others in the mainstream keep citing it too. As recently as this past Sunday, a Boston Herald editorial still had the man in the Hicks photo posing for the camera, then getting up and running around. It said the Times had "issued a correction" -- without mentioning that it related to the caption about how he got hurt, not about it being a bogus photo.

But all of this was inevitable. Many bloggers appear ignorant of time-stamping and the fact that photos are often posted on Web sites out of sequence.

Another revealing example (there are dozens) concerns the statements of a young U.S. photographer in Beirut named Bryan Denton. On Aug. 11, he posted a comment on a discussion board at the important online meeting place for photojournalists, Lightstalkers.

The photographers, by then, were already discussing charges of dead Lebanese children being displayed for the cameras in a stagey way. Timothy Fadek, whose photos have appeared in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine and dozens of other top publications, had posted on Aug. 8 that when he covered the Qana air strike he twice saw a rescuer raising "a dead child to a photographer, and in anger and distress, shouted something in Arabic which I didn't understand. But his message was clear, that he was very angry and vented his anger to the media (the world)."

Another photog, Stuart Isett, asked, referring to rescuers displaying the body of one child over and over: "How are the pictures misleading? The child is dead and the subject was showing this to the cameras -- that's how any intelligent reader would view these images. The man in the image has every right to show this dead child to the world -- this happens all the time in terrible situations.

"What this is all about, is an attempt by right wing blogs to muddy the waters and somehow claim, like Michele Malkin and Rush Limbaugh have, that Qana and other civilians deaths in Lebanon are staged."

Then, on August 11, Denton posted a comment on Lightstalkers that got the rightwing blogosphere in a dither. When he later denounced them for polticizing it, however, they were silent.

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To read the second part of this column, click here.