Last week, the North Carolina Press Photographers Association (NCPPA) rescinded three Pictures of the Year (POY) awards given to Charlotte Observer photographer Patrick Schneider.
The NCPPA board voted 4-0, with one abstention, to strip Schneider's awards after determining that he had removed background information from certain images through excessive adjustments in Photoshop. Board members include NCPPA president and News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.) photographer Chuck Liddy, Ted Richardson and Jennifer Rotenizer, photographers at the Winston-Salem Journal, and Chris English, a photographer at UNC Greensboro. David Foster, a photographer at The Observer, abstained.
Liddy told The Observer that Schneider had violated the code of ethics outlined by the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA), which states, in part: "In documentary photojournalism, it is wrong to alter the content of a photograph in any way (electronically, or in the darkroom) that deceives the public."
Questions first arose about Schneider's work after two photographers came to him with complaints. Liddy says the photographers, whom he won't name, threatened to go to the NPPA if action wasn't taken at the state level.
The NCPPA then took their concerns to The Observer, which performed an audit of the photographer's work. After looking at thousands of images, Observer editors say they found only a handful that were objectionable. Editor Jennie Buckner concluded that Schneider did not intend to deceive readers or contest judges, but that "he went over the line in the use of some techniques, which altered the backgrounds in ways that left us uncomfortable."
After nearly a month of negotiations, The Observer released Schneider's raw files to Liddy and the NCPPA. Schneider, who has won several NCPPA awards over the last few years, declined to comment on specific images, but Liddy says background details such as parking lots, fences and people were taken out of the pictures by using the digital equivalent of "hand of God" burns. Speaking about one sunrise photo (pictured), Liddy says Schneider's digital color enhancement resulted in what was "basically a made-up picture."
"The only color in that picture was blue sky at the top and the sun was a white color," Liddy says. "That was a total fabrication as far as I'm concerned."
Speaking of the others, Liddy says Schneider "didn't aggressively burn, he deleted information. There's a difference."
In one picture of grieving firefighters, Liddy says people were removed from the background. In a photo of a rollercoaster, a parking lot was eliminated from the upper part of the image.
When asked to provide Schneider's raw files for this article, The Observer declined, saying it has a policy not to release photographers' original material or reporters' notebooks.
The Observer gave Schneider a three-day, unpaid suspension, and has since vowed to set a policy about digital manipulation of news photos. Photo editor Peter Weinberger says in the future, photo illustrations will be clearly labeled and photographers will have to submit their raw files to the photo editors. Under the paper's new guidelines, minimal dodging and burning in Photoshop will be allowed, but no background elements may be removed. And for contest entries, images submitted must be the same version that ran in the newspaper.
Schneider insists that he violated no pre-determined rules. "I don't feel like I deceived the public," he says. "I did burn down backgrounds, in some points to the extreme, to bring immediacy and impact. But was it malicious? No."
Recent ethical lapses, starting with New York Times photographer Ed Keating's dismissal for posing the subject of a news photo, progressing through the Jayson Blair fiasco and ending with Los Angeles Times photographer Brian Walski losing his job for compositing two images from Iraq, have heightened awareness of journalistic ethics. As a result, most editors and photographers agree that photo retouching techniques that were once acceptable are no longer valid at today's battered and bruised newspapers.
"We're trying to maintain our credibility and the trust of the public, and in order to do that, we've got to tighten our reigns," says John Long, Hartford Courant photographer and NPPA ethics co-chair. When confronting an ethical issue, Long says it's best to consider the following: "Once a moment is captured on film or digital, you no longer have the right to change the content of the picture."
Long says what Schneider did was deceptive because it wasn't what the photographer saw. Long describes minimal dodging and burning as part of the grammar of photography that allows photos to be read more easily. But ultimately, what the viewer sees should be what the photographer saw, Long says.
Part of the problem is the lack of an authoritative code of ethics. The NPPA's code dates back to 1947, though the organization did release a Statement of Principle in the early ‘90s to address some of the questions raised by digital technologies.
On Friday, the NPPA had its first discussion about updating its code. Ethics scholars Deni Elliott and Paul Lester will be leading the overhaul.
"Codes of ethics tend to be general, so they're putting together workbooks with specific examples to allow newspapers to set their own rules," Long says.
Schneider says he grew up as a photographer studying the NPPA's Pictures of the Year (POY) books, which showcased work from the greats of photography that were heavily dodged and burned in traditional wet darkrooms. As the industry progressed into the digital age, Schneider says ethical policies didn't keep pace with changes in technology.
"What we used to be able to do in our business, hand of God or toning, is no longer acceptable and there needs to be a rule on that," Schneider says.
Schneider says he was influenced by the work of Stan Grossfeld and W. Eugene Smith, two award-winning photographers known to have a heavy hand in the darkroom. After his death, it was discovered that Smith actually went well beyond removing backgrounds, sometimes changing the direction of a subject's gaze or combining elements from different frames to enhance a composition.
Jim Hughes, a Smith scholar and author of W. Eugene Smith: Shadow and Substance, says the photographer was able to get away with so much because he was so good. But times have changed, Hughes says.
"The significance of the Jayson Blair and Brian Walski incidents have had a significant affect," Hughes says. "I don't think [Smith] would be journalistically employable today in terms of how closely [rules are] defined."
Especially since the Blair revelation, editors have been extra vigilant about making sure no ethical lines are crossed. Still, detecting digital manipulations has proven difficult to even the trained eyes of photo editors and competition judges. Walski's image slid past several layers of editing, and the three judges who awarded Schneider runner-up in the NCPPA's POY category didn't notice anything out of the ordinary, despite a lengthy discussion about his work. All three judges — Spokesman Review photographer Brian Plonka, freelance photographer Susie Post-Rust and photo editor Anne McQuary — say closer attention should be paid in future contests.
"You assume that what you see is what was there and you certainly don't second-guess folks," says McQuary, photo editor at The Sun News (Myrtle Beach, South Carolina). "Those thoughts don't even cross your mind.
"The harder part now is to keep talking about this and not about what one person did, but what everyone does," McQuary says. "The only thing photojournalists have is their credibility. Why give people more cause to doubt what we do every day, what we've chosen as a profession? Nothing's worth that, not even a Pulitzer."
While most of the attention has been paid to newspaper journalists, Long says magazines need to be taken to task for frequent manipulation of photos. Long points to Time's darkened OJ Simpson cover and National Geographic's moving pyramid cover, which, though it ran in the early ‘80s is still a popular reference point, as damaging to the profession.
To his credit, Schneider has not shied away from the controversy. The photographer spoke about the issue last Saturday at the Grandfather Mountain workshops in North Carolina, and is scheduled to address his peers at the NPPA's Women in Photojournalism workshop in Charlotte next month.
"I'm not going to change my style of shooting, I'm going to change my style of toning," Schneider says, adding, "I will enter the contest again next year."
Related Links
2002 NCPPA POY Results, with more of Schneider's photographs
Side-by-side comparisons of original and altered images (Requires Flash)
A Photojournalistic Confession, personal essay by Poynter.org's Kenny Irby
Ethics In The Age Of Digital Photography, web essay by John Long
Brian Walski Discusses His Doctored Photo
Controversial Photo Ends Keating’s Career At The Times
