When Your Eyes Tell You Lies

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 16, 2000 | by Timothy W. Maier

Government and the media commonly manipulate video and photographs using modern computer technology, raising ethical questions concerning truth and deception.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but doctoring a photo sometimes says a lot more. Hollywood certainly has played doctor more than once. Remember the movie Capricorn One -- in which the plot centers around a mission to Mars, faked in a movie studio, that convinced the whole world we had landed a team of astronauts on the Red Planet? Such a conspiracy might seem hard to pull off in real life, but don't bet your mortgage on it.

During the last 150 years, photographs repeatedly have been manipulated for propaganda, fraud, humor, profit and just to rewrite history. In the mid-1800s, supernatural spirits sometimes were "photographed" by unscrupulous photographers through the expediency of overexposing pictures and superimposing an old photo of a deceased husband or wife.

"Historically people have done it for years with simply scissors and paste, but modern technology has made it much easier," says Larry Nighswander, director of Ohio University's School of Visual Communication. A former photo editor at National Geographic, Nighswander recalls the famous "moving-pyramid" shot in which editors before his time appeared to have moved the pyramids for a cover shot. "Immediately after they did it, they were caught" he says. "They rotated the image; they didn't move the pyramids. They moved the photographer

to make it appear he shot it from a different angle"

But after critics cried foul, Nighswander says, National Geographic immediately implemented a policy against photo manipulation. Today, he says, advances in technology have created a monster. "The danger is that we can mislead anybody -- a reader, a family member. In our attempt to deceive we have crossed an ethical barrier."

While the technical advances assuredly have had a positive impact, with law-enforcement agencies using computer simulation to project the ages of lost children, to reconstruct crime scenes and to catch criminals, the downside to this evolving technology has left the public wondering if it can trust what it sees. John Long, ethics chairman of the National Press Photographer's Association, warns: "You can't believe anything you see. It's been an epidemic. It has threatened the credibility of visual news reporting."

Indeed, photographs are being manipulated at an alarming rate. Each year, 38 million pictures are taken in the United States and, according to the Rochester Institute of Technology, 10 percent of those photos are altered.

It is common practice to publish altered photos along with a small, barely readable disclaimer explaining the picture has been enhanced or modified by a computer. The National Enquirer used computers to place bruises on Nicole Brown Simpson's face -- an image that many still remember as a true and accurate photograph. More recently the Enquirer displayed computerized shots of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s airplane with the small-print disclaimer that it was a computer rendition created by a photo illustrator.

"Does the average viewer understand what a photo illustrator is?" wonders Nighswander. "What's the difference between a photo illustrator and a photographer? I don't think people know. We are blurring the perception of reality."

Of course sometimes the media designers do it for artistic or humorous reasons, such as when Insight engaged in a little computer fun by superimposing Bill Clinton's head on the chained body of Harry Houdini to suggest the president had become an escape artist (Jan. 11-18, 1999). While the humor depends on making it obvious the photograph has been altered, some famous manipulated shots have gone down in history as the truth.

For example, the Library of Congress displays a statuesque and robust portrait of Abraham Lincoln. The real thing? Look again. After Lincoln's death, the head from a portrait of Lincoln by Mathew Brady was reversed and placed on the body of Sen. John Calhoun to make this famous picture. More recently, a photo of three U.S. soldiers supposedly left behind in Vietnam appeared mysteriously in 1991. Relatives claimed that the men were Vietnam fliers Col. John Robertson, Lt. Cmdr. Larry Stevens and Maj. Albro L. Lundy Jr., who were listed as missing. It turns out the image was a doctored 1923 photo of three Soviet farmers that appeared in a 1989 issue of a Khmer-language publication, according to the CIA.

Such photo fakery is getting harder to detect. No longer are the manipulators simply using watercolors and dyes to retouch portraits. Advertisers, politicians and the media often add, move or delete individuals in photos to show people or events in their best light. For example, on the Aug. 26-Sept 1, 1989, cover of TV Guide, Oprah Winfrey's head was put on dancer Ann-Margret's body. Five years later ABC News duped Americans after the State of the Union address when Cokie Roberts was shown standing in a trench coat reporting on the reaction to the president's speech from in front of the Capitol. One problem: She wasn't there but was inside a studio at the ABC Washington bureau in front of a projection of the Capitol building.