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SUMMARY: A New York exhibit chronicles prominent cases of images altered by journalists and asks: If seeing is believing, how often are you, the viewer or reader, being misled? Saskia de Melker reports.
SASKIA DE MELKER (NewsHour): When you don’t like those people or objects in the background, you just remove them.
Using a filter, after the snap, to make a regular photo look vintage, is as easy as a mouse click. So is removing a light post that seems to be shooting out of someone’s head by using Photoshop.
But in the world of photojournalism, these alterations are the subject of intense debate. And using Photoshop can land you in hot water. Like it did for The Economist when it removed people from this beach photo of President Obama.
Or for an Orthodox Israeli newspaper when it cut out the female leaders in this photo.
MICHAEL KAMBER: People do that all the time on their Facebook page. That’s fine. We’re the [photojournalist] professionals. We have to maintain standards and ethics. We have to make sure that these photos are an accurate representation.
SASKIA DE MELKER: Photographer Michael Kamber has covered conflicts around the world for the New York Times. His latest project, though, is curating an exhibition at the Bronx Documentary Center called “Altered Images”, which explores news and documentary photos that have been manipulated.
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