Abstract
Digital manipulation in photojournalism is the subject of ongoing debate. At the heart of the controversy over what is and what is not an acceptable alteration of a photograph is the often tenuous relationship between the reality and the captured image. Digital photography has complicated the situation because alterations are easier to accomplish and more difficult to detect. However, there is no consensus among the visual journalists about what comprises ethical image-making. This study examines some of the challenges faced by photojournalists in Lithuania, where news photography was hampered by decades of the Soviet occupation. A questionnaire of Lithuanian Press Photo Club members and two focus groups of photojournalists showed broad agreement about the acceptable alterations of the photographic image and other ethical norms but revealed a dearth of professional empowerment to put norms into practice. Photojournalists see themselves less as journalists and more as providers of a service to media organizations. Agreement about the need to regulate the professional ethics was accompanied by denials that photojournalists can take a personal responsibility for their work.
Highlights
The 2015 prestigious World Press Photo competition was accompanied by controversy widely reported in both mass circulation and professional media, which sparked an intensive global debate among the photojournalists about the professional ethics in the 21st Century digital environment
This study examines some of the challenges faced by photojournalists in Lithuania, where news photography was hampered by decades of the Soviet occupation
Throughout the 20th Century, iconic photographs helped define and symbolize important events and times: the sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square marking the end of the Second World War, the naked napalm girl in Vietnam, the astronaut on the Moon with the landing craft reflected in his visor, a young man standing in front of advancing tanks in Tiananmen Square and, in the case of Lithuania, people pushing against a Soviet tank with a victim’s legs trapped under its track
Summary
The 2015 prestigious World Press Photo competition was accompanied by controversy widely reported in both mass circulation and professional media, which sparked an intensive global debate among the photojournalists about the professional ethics in the 21st Century digital environment. Documentary photographers and social reformers, including Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine in the United States and Henry Mayhew in England used photographic images to reveal a world of poverty and despair unseen by the middle and upper classes. Publications such as Look (US), Life (US), Vu (France), Picture Post (UK), and Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (Germany) offered dramatic and engaging visual storytelling, making them immensely popular with readers and marking what often is called the Golden Age of photojournalism. Susan Sontag (2008: 86) describes the photograph as a “struggle between two different imperatives: beautification, which comes from the fine arts, and truth-telling, which is measured by a notion of value-free truth, a legacy from the sciences, but by a moralized ideal of truth-telling, adapted from nineteenth-century literary models and from the () new profession of independent journalism“
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