I think we will have to give
this story a few days to shake out and get to the truth, but it certainly raises public awareness about photo alteration.
To catch you up, the company that makes Dove beauty products is running an ad campaign called "Real Beauty," which features women who are more normal in body type than one usually sees in advertising. (How do you like the way I skated around that one?)
But in an interview with The New Yorker (the article starts
here), a top retouch artist says he cleaned up the so-called "Real Beauties."
Now, the retoucher is saying he didn't change the shape of the women; he only cleaned the photos for dust and color correction.
Dove has been on a multi-year campaign to tell the public, and especially young girls, that they can be proud of who they are and how they look and not to compare themselves to computer-enhanced models. No doubt you have seen the
"Evolution" video; maybe you have seen the follow-up video called "
Onslaught."
This story prompts the question: How much cleanup or retouching is too much in news photography? Is it the same for videography? Is it the same for online journalism?
I am asked this question often in online video seminars and workshops. I default to the question that my Poynter colleague Kenny Irby often asks: "What did you see through the viewfinder?"
Journalism ethics, I believe, allow us to render a photographic (and video) image to match what we saw in reality. Any steps away from that turn what was once true into untrue. For that reason, I do not oppose color correction, burning, dodging and such, which can put the image as close as possible to what existed when we captured it.
All of these techniques are part of the editing process, just as we edit text for print and online. Cropping has to be done carefully to maintain the context of the photograph -- just as we have to keep quotes, for example, in context.
So, what story comes from this? I think it would be refreshing to see newspapers, magazines, news sites, TV stations and radio stations explain what their standards are when it comes to photo editing and image manipulation.
You could do a side-by-side comparison of a real photo and a manipulated one and show subtle changes in the image. You could explain why each change would or would not be allowed in your publication.
For radio, I think explaining when and how you make audio edits would be interesting. Most listeners, I daresay, have no idea that you edit what seem to be live interviews.
For TV and online video: When and how do you use slow-motion? When do you use the fit-to-fill tool on your editing systems? When is it ethical to add sound or music to a story?
Even if you never do a story on these questions, you should be able to explain them to one other in your newsroom.
