So the big story today appears to have been broken by a blogger once again. Mainly that a professional photographer who works in Lebanon is admitting that not only do the stringers pose bodies for shots but that they dig out bodies from graves to make a shot more "newsworthy".
I'm speaking about a post made by Brian Denton to a photography blog about the directing done by the Lebanese:
i have been working in Lebanon since all this started, and seeing the behavior of many of the Lebanese wire service photographers has been a bit unsettling. while hajj has garnered a lot of attention for his doctoring of images digitally, whether guilty or not, i have been witness to the daily practice of directed shots, one case where a group of wire photogs were choreographing the unearthing of bodies, directing emergency workers here and there, asking them to position bodies just so, even remove bodies that have already been put in graves so that they can photograph them in peoples arms. these photographers have come away with powerful shots, that required no manipulation digitally, but instead, manipulation on a human level, and this itself is a bigger ethical problem.
whatever the case is-lack of training, a personal drive as a photographer to show what is happening to your country in as powerful a way as possible, or all out competitiveness, i think that the onus is on the wire services themselves, because they act as the employer/filter of their photogs work. standards should be in place or else the rest of us end up paying the price. and i'm not against the idea of local wire photographers, but after seeing it over and over for the past month, i think it is something that is worth addressing. while i walk away from a situation like that, one wire shooter sets up a situation, and the rest of them follow…….
by Bryan Denton Fri Aug 11 07:36:08 UTC 2006 | Beirut, Lebanon
The big guys had to prove this Bryan Denton was who he said he was so they checked out his profile on the photography blog where he left this comment called Lightstalkers. And then they researched his work, which has appeared in the New York Times.
After taking a look at his work he appears to be legit.
So what we have here is a witness to the disgusting practice of making news instead of reporting it. Of course this caused many of the liberal photographers in the blog to attack him to which he responded:
hi all,
sorry to have not been specific. just to make this clear. i was not in qana and am not referring to the massacre that took place there. i have been covering Beirut, and it was at numerous protest, evacuations as well as the Israeli strikes in chiyeh, which unfortunately did not get that much coverage in the media-where i saw this behavior occur. i have also heard from friends of mine in Lebanon, respected photographers, that this was not an isolated incident.
unfortunately in each of these cases, it was the Lebanese wire photographers that started these situations. that said, i am not trying to make generalizations. i know that there are a number of dedicated and brilliant Lebanese photographers here who are putting themselves in extremely dangerous situations in order to document what is happening here in their country, and in hindsight, i realize it was irresponsible for me to post the previous statement because it was not specific enough. however, this has been something I've noticed happening here, more than any other place I've worked previously.
i agree that there is a lot of pressure, particularly on stringers (i myself am a freelancer), due to cost cutting and how the big image banks pay their non-staff photographers, and while unfortunate events like qana and chiyeh require the utmost responsibility, seeing it happen for things like protests and evacuations is equally as disturbing and doesn't bode well.
again, i am terribly sorry for rattling the saber so hard….re-reading my words I too should have been a bit more responsible.
by Bryan Denton Fri Aug 11 16:27:35 UTC 2006 | Beirut, Lebanon
Allah at Hot Air took a look at those photos from the Israeli strike at Chiyeh that Bryan references and found some interesting pics:
I'm sorry, but these few pictures validate much of what Bryan is saying. Who needs face masks for those who have recently died? Believe me, I am a cop and have seen many dead people…and smelled them. A recently killed person does not smell. I have gone into areas where a dead body has been for a few days in hot climate and not needed a mask. It's uncomfortable for sure, but not unbearable. The only time I have needed a mask was after a body had been dumped along the brush beside a freeway and had been left there for over a week, now that was bad.
This should tell you how long a few of these bodies has been dead….look at the masks.
Recall in my last post about the AP's propaganda piece on Green Helmet guy, Riehl World View found out that the writer is the the AP bureau chief in Iran….something to consider since there is no way that country would allow her to stay if she printed anything negative about Hezbollah or their cause. We all pegged that article of hers as a fluff piece of propaganda and now we have further proof. She is only ensuring that her job is safe….what ethics.
Most surprising in today's news about these controversy's is the LA Times coming out with this editorial by Tim Rutten:
There are, however, two problems here, and they're the reason this controversy shouldn't be allowed to sputter to its inglorious conclusion just yet: One of these has to do with the scope of what strongly appears to be wider fabrication in the photojournalism Reuters and other news agencies are obtaining from their freelancers in Lebanon. The other is the U.S. news media's grudging response to the revelation of Hajj's misconduct and its utter lack of interest in exploring whether his is a unique or representative case.
Thus far, only a handful of relatively brief stories on this affair have appeared in major American papers. The Times picked up one from the Washington Post, which focused mainly on the politics of Johnson's website. The New York Times, which ran one of Hajj's photos on its front page Saturday, reported that it has published eight of his pictures since 2003, but none were altered. It then went on to quote other papers about steps they take to detect fraudulent images. No paper has taken up the challenge of determining whether there's anything dodgy about the flow of freelance photos Reuters and other news agencies – including the Associated Press, which also transmitted images made by Hajj – are sending out of tormented Lebanon.
[…]What's hard to imagine is how anybody can look at the photos and not conclude that they're riddled with journalistic deceit.
Many, including grisly images from the Qana tragedy, clearly are posed for maximum dramatic effect. There is an entire series of photos of children's stuffed toys poised atop mounds of rubble. All are miraculously pristinely clean and apparently untouched by the devastation they purportedly survived. (Reuters might want to check its freelancers' expenses for unexplained Toys R Us purchases.) In some cases, the bloggers seem to have uncovered the same photographer using more than one identity. There's an improbable photo by Hajj of a Koran burning atop the rubble of a building supposedly destroyed by an Israeli aircraft hours before. Nothing else in sight is alight. (With photos, as in life, when something seems too perfect to be true, it's almost always because it is.) In other photos, the same wrecked building is portrayed multiple times with the same older woman – one supposes she ought to be called a model – either lamenting its destruction or passing by in different costumes.
There's more, and it's worth your time to take a look. That's one of the undeniable strengths of the Internet and of the blogosphere, and the fact that it is being employed to help keep journalism honest ultimately is to everybody's benefit.
What the major news organizations ought to be doing is to make their own analysis of the images coming out of Lebanon and if, as seems more than likely, they find widespread malfeasance, some hard questions need to be asked about why it occurred.
[…]That brings us to the most troubling of the possible explanations for these fraudulent photos, which is that some of the photojournalists involved are either intimidated by or sympathetic to the Hezbollah terrorists. It's a possibility fraught with harsh implications, but it needs to be examined thoroughly and openly.
Johnson and his colleagues have done the serious news media a service. Failure to follow up on it would be worse than churlish; it would be irresponsible.
The LA Times printed that, can you believe it?
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I’m not sure the masks are indicative of much. There is so much dust, the masks may be for that rather than the smell. There is enough to complain about with yet more babies being held up for the camera like bowling trophies.