A photojournalist weighs in on the Adnan Hajj scandal
Okay, we all know the facts by now. Adnan Hajj, ex-photojournalist for Reuters, manipulated at least some of his photographs before submitting them to the wire service. Hajj has been fired, and all of his photos have been removed from the Reuters archive pending an investigation.
(The investigation, in this case, may involve Reuters dumping 920 photographs with Hajjs name on them into a deep hole, paving over the top and getting on with their lives.)
So now we know the what. We know what happened Adnan Hajj faked at least two photos and submitted them to Reuters. We will probably never know why. (Though some folks think it was all just a big conspiracy.)
That leaves how. How did this happen?
This morning I was able to interview a freelance photographer who works for the Associated Press and other news organizations, and I learned a lot about how this whole business works.
Diane Bondareff was the Official Photographer to the Mayor of New York City during the administration of Rudy Giuliani. Today she shoots for the AP, Bloomberg, The New York Times and other organizations. As a freelancer, she shoots just about anything photo-worthy: politics, business news, entertainment, features. Living in New York City, Diane has covered the United Nations and the attacks of September 11.
I asked her today about the logistics of being a freelance photographer for a wire service. For example, who decides what she shoots?
The majority of my work for the AP is on assignment, Diane said. Occasionally I find a story that interests me on my own and will offer the photos on spec to the AP and then I only get paid if they accept the photos for the wire. But, she said, mostly, a photo assignment editor at the New York metro bureau tells me what to shoot.
I asked Diane who writes the captions for her photos, whether she writes them herself or theyre written by an editor at the bureau. I was surprised but, in retrospect, shouldnt have been to learn that the answer is both. My caption is basically who, what, where and when, she said, and I keep the caption as generic as possible. If theres relevant information beyond what Diane provides, she said an editor will expand the caption.
For example, her caption might read, Traders work on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange Wednesday, Aug. 2, 2006, in New York. The bureau business editor might add, Crude oil and gasoline prices rose sharply Wednesday after a government report showed that U.S. crude and gasoline inventories fell last week, and as a tropical storm gained strength in the Caribbean.
In other words, the photographer documents the facts of the picture in the caption, while the editor adds context.
I next asked Diane what kind of post-processing she does to her photos, whether she uses Photoshop at all, and if so to what extent.
In short, Diane said, she will only adjust what can be done easily in a darkroom to a film negative lightness, contrast, dust and cropping. She said that she will use Photoshop tools to remove dust and scratches from her photographs even in the age of shooting digital, dust and scratches can still creep into photographs.
She also said that shell use Photoshops unsharp mask operation to improve the focus of a soft photo, but maybe some other shooters wouldnt even do that.
The professional standards for photojournalists, therefore, are very restrictive. Photos can be cropped, but they may not be airbrushed except to remove small camera artifacts, and even then only if doing so doesnt change the content of the photo. The brightness and contrast of a photo can be changed, just as a photographer could adjust the exposure of a negative during processing, but there are strict limits. For instance, a photographer for the Charlotte Observer was fired recently for drastically adjusting the exposure of one of his photographs. And in that case, the adjustment didnt even change the content of the photo, just the color of the sky.
Diane freely acknowledged that typographical errors and other minor mistakes can creep into photo captions. As someone who has worked for a newspaper, I can attest that errors like that are inevitable, and generally harmless. But, Diane said, I prefer to think that an AP editor would catch such a blatant PhotoShop re-touch as Adnan Hajj did on his photo.
Covering a war zone is much harder than covering entertainment events in New York, Diane said, but that doesnt excuse manipulating a photo to make it seem better or more dramatic to the shooter.
So now I know a heck of a lot more about how freelance photojournalism works. But I dont have any more answers than when I started. I still dont have any idea whether one or more photo editors at Reuters were complicit in Hajjs attempted frauds, or whether they were just incompetent at their jobs, or whether the process itself failed somehow.
What I do know is that Reuters standards of journalistic integrity are now seriously in doubt. Whether they will stay in doubt depends entirely on what Reuters does from now on. If we continue to see photos that are obviously staged or that run with false or misleading captions, for example, well know that the problems at Reuters run far deeper than one troubled photojournalist.
One thing is certain: We will all be watching.
Naturally, theres one other piece to this puzzle, one that I hesitate to mention because its circumstantial at best, and maybe even downright wrong. But I think its interesting, so I present it for my readers to make up their own minds.
In 2004, Reuters opened an office in Bangalore, India, staffed with 20 Indian journalists covering 2,000 small to medium-sized American companies and a team of six editors.
Reuters admits costs are 60 per cent less in Bangalore than its onshore centres in New York, Britain and Singapore, wrote Randeep Ramesh of The Hindu.
This is just the beginning for Reuters in Bangalore. The companys data unit, which archives material for 30,000 global firms, already employs 300 people and will grow by another 300 next year.
The average age in the office is 25.
In the words of one reader, You get what you pay for.
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