Authenticity is Key: Why Misleading Viewers is the Deadliest Sin of Visual Storytelling
The power of visual storytelling lies in its ability to convey a message through images. We use photos, illustrations, graphs and charts, and more to represent the stories we wish to tell. But what happens when we use these visuals to manipulate or obscure our message?
Photo manipulation can vastly change the outcome of the visual narratives we wish to communicate. For example, setting up an image to recreate something that was missed or even doctoring and image to construct a desired narrative are both forms of lying to our audience and misrepresenting the truth. This is especially harmful in photojournalism.
“It seems that the honor system is not working. Editors need to be a little tougher and demand those raw files to see the timelines and those mistakes when there is a suspicion that something is not correct.”
Take this photo for example. It depicts a British soldier motioning to civilians to take cover under gunfire. However, as you can see, the photo has been doctored from two separate images. This cost the journalist Brian Walski to lose his job at the Los Angeles Times, as the integrity of the publication was severely questioned. The truth is of the utmost importance in photojournalism as it is the core purpose of the job: representing truth.
This is especially important as images such as photographs are a medium that people have trusted throughout its history. In a 2017 study, it was revealed that the untrained eye is not as adapt at noticing altered and edited photos,
“The vast majority of image authenticity judgments, however, are still made by eye, and to our knowledge only one published study has explored the extent to which people can detect inconsistencies in images.…It is clear that people find it difficult to detect and locate manipulations in real-world photos, regardless of whether those manipulations lead to physically plausible or implausible scenes,” (Nightingale, S.J., Wade, K.A. & Watson, 2017).
This is especially concerning, given the rise of artificial intelligence in photo editing software such as Photoshop. Its new AI capabilities allow users to generate and insert objects based on prompts. This goes beyond the aforementioned issue of manually doctored images, and takes it to an entirely new level.
While editing can serve as a necessary tool for depicting accuracy or aesthetic vision, photographers must consider the ethics of misrepresenting their narratives, and how far is too far.
Reference:
Nightingale, S.J., Wade, K.A. & Watson, D.G. Can people identify original and manipulated photos of real-world scenes?. Cogn. Research 2, 30 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-017-0067-2
The New York Times. (2015, October 16). Staging, manipulation and truth in photography. https://archive.nytimes.com/lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/16/staging-manipulation-ethics-photos/
Pictures that lie (photos). CNET. (n.d.). https://www.cnet.com/pictures/pictures-that-lie-photos/