Using Photoshop To Alter A Photo Isn’t Deceptive If There’s Full Disclosure. Also, “Reverse Sexism” Raises Its Annoying Ugly Head

So Nancy Pelosi, wanting to commemorate the record-breaking 61 female members of the Democratic House Caucus, had the above photos taken. But four women were not present for the photo, and so were Photoshopped into the back row (and rather badly Photoshopped, I might add). Pelosi then posted the photo on her Flickr and (I assume) released it to the press, without explaining that the photo was actually a digital composite.

Jack at Ethics Alarms, with his usual restraint, writes:

A digitally altered photograph that misrepresents an event by inserting individuals who were not present is ethically indistinguishable from the old Soviet Union practice of excising the images of purged officials from official photographs. It is a lie.

What bugs me about Pelosi’s altered photo (other than how poorly done the Photoshop job was) is that the digital alteration wasn’t announced when the photo was posted.

If Pelosi had posted the exact same (altered) photo, accompanied by a caption identifying the four figures that had been inserted digitally, then it would have been fine with me. They wanted an illustration to commemorate their new record, and I don’t see anything wrong with using digital means to make an illustration, as long as there’s full disclosure.

I said so at Jack’s blog, and Jack responded:

I think the deception makes the conduct a lot worse, yes. The digital manipulation still changes the photo from what purports to be a record of what really occurred to something else. You can’t say: and here we have a historic photo of all the women in the house (oh, by the way, the following 17 images–or one–are of people who really weren’t there.) What’s preventing the explanation from being separated from the photo 100 years from now?

Jack’s argument is an argument for never printing or posting any photo, since any photo could be distorted by later reproducers. Let’s say I take a photo of Obama and Romney together at a charity event; what’s to prevent the photo from being cropped to make it seem one wasn’t present, a hundred years from now? Should we therefore not print the photo?

An honest report is an honest report. A digitally altered photograph with full disclosure of how it was made is honest; an unaltered photo is also honest.

Both digitally composed photos and unaltered photos are subject to having their context snipped out by later reproductions. If (as Jack claims) the hypothetical possibility of having important context removed makes a photograph unethical, then it logically must do so for both kinds of photo, not just for digitally altered photos.

Jack also thought that Pelosi’s photo is sexist:

I believe that a gender-segregated photo of female legislators is sexist, prejudicial and hypocritical. Every one of these women would scream if, for example, Republican House members posed for a photo excluding the women in their number.

Many of these women are now in their 60s and 70s, and the near-total exclusion of women from Congress is something they experienced firsthand, and that they themselves have been part of reversing. Nothing wrong with a photo commemorating that achievement.

Since there has, in fact, been no exclusion of men from Congress to be painstakingly overcome, Jack’s “what if they excluded the women from an all-male photo” reversal is idiotic. An all-male photo such as Jack suggests would not commemorate overcoming a prejudice; it would be, if anything, object to that prejudice being overcome. That’s a huge contextual difference.

What next, complaining that if Black people celebrate African-American progress in the last century, that’s racist against White people? Such a complaint would be exactly as groundless and foolish as Jack’s complaint in this post. It would, in fact, be the same complaint.

Finally, descending into right-wing tropes, Jack wrote:

Voters shouldn’t vote on the basis of race and gender, but this is the whole strategy of one major party—tactical divisiveness and one-way bigotry.

Ironically, Jack intended that as a dig at the Democrats, not at the GOP.

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16 Responses to Using Photoshop To Alter A Photo Isn’t Deceptive If There’s Full Disclosure. Also, “Reverse Sexism” Raises Its Annoying Ugly Head

  1. Funnily enough, someone just recently pointed me toward some Civil War-era “photoshopping” done along the exact same lines and for the exact same reasons:

    http://metmuseum.org/exhibitions/view?exhibitionId={36D81705-241D-4934-AB02-FD7C8DBBB3E5}&oid=190049163&pg=2&rpp=50&pos=83&ft=*

    (EDIT: The comments form doesn’t seem to like the formatting in that link, but if you copy-and-paste the whole thing it works just fine. Ditto below.)

    “During the Grand Review of the Armies held in Washington, D.C., at the close of the Civil War, Brady scheduled an afternoon portrait session with Union Army General William Tecumseh Sherman and his closest staff. All but one of the eight officers arrived promptly at the studio. ‘At 3 o’clock he had not put in an appearance,’ Brady recalled of the missing general, ‘so we made a negative without him’ (see ills.). Later in the day, when the tardy officer presented himself, Brady photographed him alone, reuniting him with his comrades by means of photomontage.”

    Of course, Brady’s nephew made HIS living using the same technique and his uncle’s stock of negatives to create dramatic Civil War “photos” of things that never happened:

    http://metmuseum.org/exhibitions/view?exhibitionId={36D81705-241D-4934-AB02-FD7C8DBBB3E5}&oid=190049163&pg=2&rpp=50&pos=83&ft=*

    So there’s certainly room for concern. But the concern’s as old as photography itself — hardly unique to Nancy Pelosi, or that deliciously-laden phrasing “the old Soviet Union practice.”

    Funny to see this come up right after I’d had those Civil War manipulations pointed out to me; I may put the two together for some sort of blog post in the next few days.

  2. 2
    mythago says:

    Amp, you don’t HAVE to dialogue with this guy. As a friend of mine puts it, “you are not actually the Jackass Whisperer.”

  3. 3
    Bloix says:

    IMHO, there’s nothing wrong with photo-illustration, but this sort of manipulation of a historical event is a mistake, no matter how well-intentioned.

  4. 4
    Another Alex says:

    What historical event? The historical moment 57 democrat women stood on the steps of the House? It’s not photo-journalism. These things are not supposed to be an accurate version of reality – they’re more a modern version of portraiture. Expecting it to be a faithful representation of reality is completely unreasonable. This guy’s going to go blow his top when he sees Warhol’s pictures of Marilyn Monroe.

  5. 5
    Robert says:

    I agree with Amp.

    Leaving the impression that the photo is a simply accurate representation of an actual assembly-in-full is an error, though a relatively minor one. The technique itself is perfectly acceptable, so long as there is a reasonable disclosure of facts. (“Several members could not be present for the photograph, and have been digitally added, apparently by a monkey using MSPaint, to present a tableau of all the female Democrats in the House in the 113th Congress.” would do the job.)

    The archival-of-the-future point is a valid one, but that’s the job of the custodians of the records between now and then. All the present can do is speak the truth and disclose when things are not as they appear.

  6. 6
    Copyleft says:

    Seems like it would be simpler to just add “Not Pictured: A, B, C, and D” to the caption.

  7. 7
    Robert says:

    Or simplest still to just not have a picture. Simplicity is not always the best metric.

    It’s difficult to get 57 Congresspeople together at one time. Every meeting they have, there’s going to be someone who doesn’t show; even if they have a special mandatory you-must-be-here-for-picture-day session, someone’s going to be in the hospital or stuck in traffic or on an airplane in Iowa, grounded for lack of sufficient lemon-scented wipes. It’s reasonable to want a photographic record of the existence of these 57 people, and to use a group shot of most of them as the foundation.

  8. 8
    Ruchama says:

    There are several people present in the second photo who aren’t in the first, besides the four in the back. I notice the woman in black at the far right of the first row, the one in black blazer and grey pants at the far left of the second row, and the one with the yellow hat about halfway up on the right. Were they photoshopped in better, or did they just come late and get into one photo but not another?

  9. 9
    RonF says:

    I agree; “reverse sexism” is an ugly term, just as “reverse racism” is. Sexism is discriminating against or imputing certain kinds of characteristics to someone purely on the basis of their sex. Women doing so to men is just as properly defined as sexist/sexism as men doing so to women.

  10. 10
    fannie says:

    “I believe that a gender-segregated photo of female legislators is sexist, prejudicial and hypocritical. “

    Okay, let’s play along. It is sexist, prejudicial, and hypocritical. Oh well.

    It may not be anti-feminist-politically-correct to say, but I value acknowledging the historical fact that women were historically excluded from legislative office more than I value erasing historical context for the sake of moral consistency. Non-feminists and anti-feminists often try to erase historical context by attaching labels like sexist, prejudicial, hypocritical, or racist to to photographs, celebrations, days, classes, books, or articles that remind people of historical oppression.

    And of course Jack Just Somehow Magically Knows that “every single” woman in the photo would react hysterically (“scream”) if only men were photographed.

  11. 11
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    Hey, see, this is the perfect place for my system! not that I expect anyone else to use it, but

    1) Women are more than 50% of the electorate.
    2) Women are a bit less than 20% of congress (and concentrated more in the house.)
    3) For this issue, women are so far from proportionality that the “does it make sense to give special benefits?” question doesn’t even require any justification, and the “what if you did that to the other side?” question gets to be answered by saying “yeah, whatever; bring that up when they hit 40% and we’ll argue then.”

  12. 12
    JutGory says:

    Amp,
    Just curious: would it change anything if one of those women deliberately skipped the photo-op because she did not want to participate?
    Just a hypothetical.
    -Jut

  13. 13
    RonF says:

    GiW, I’m not sure of your point. Are you proposing that the electoral system be manipulated in some fashion so as to ensure an advantage towards electing women until such time as the proportion of women in the Congress reaches ‘x’ percentage?

  14. 14
    Ampersand says:

    Just curious: would it change anything if one of those women deliberately skipped the photo-op because she did not want to participate?
    Just a hypothetical.

    Yes. I think as the leader of the House Democrats, Pelosi has a responsibility to be considerate, and it might be wrong for her (or her staff) to go against a member’s wishes regarding the use of that member’s image.

    I’d feel differently if it were an independent news organization putting the photo collage together. Generally speaking, I don’t think elected officials should have any expectation of controlling how their image is used by news orgs.

  15. 15
    JutGory says:

    Amp:

    I’d feel differently if it were an independent news organization putting the photo collage together. Generally speaking, I don’t think elected officials should have any expectation of controlling how their image is used by news orgs.

    Actually, that seems to be worse, and it gets back to your other point. “News organizations” should not be manipulating images, as they should be more focused on historical integrity. Even if they say “X, Y, Z added,” they should be more focused on accuracy than others.

    -Jut

  16. 16
    Stentor says:

    What next, complaining that if Black people celebrate African-American progress in the last century, that’s racist against White people?

    Uh, you do realize that people complain about this exact thing all the time, right? Reductio ad absurdum doesn’t really work when a big chunk of your audience doesn’t view the reductio as terribly absurd. I don’t know Jack’s personal position, but the kind of person who thinks a photo of all the female members of congress is sexist is highly likely to already think that Black History Month is racist against white people. It’s as if he said to you “you want equality for women? What next, equality for POC too?”