I am uncomfortable watching an interrogation that is misguided if related to some elusive standard of photojournalism. … Pressing Steve McCurry for explanations when one already knows the reasons he used Photoshop — to create a more saleable, viewable image — evades more serious issues about who controls photography, and when and how to liberate it. […]
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From where I sit, the most important consequence of this scandal (aside from reminding us that photographers, like most people, will do anything that benefits them, ethics be damned) lies in the fact that the vapid phrase “visual storyteller” has suddenly become highlighted — while acquiring a darker meaning — with the revelation that Magnum photographer Steve McCurry deploys it as a both a rationale and a magic charm that, he seems to think, immunizes him from the charges of bad faith and breach of professional ethics that accrue nowadays to a photojournalist who gets caught doing the same things. […] More and more, teaching artists and art teachers (these are not synonyms) work under short-term contracts of two years or less, moving continuously from job to job. Their tenuous hold on stability is further undermined by the evolution of an underclass of freelance pieceworkers: part-time teachers willing to work for next to nothing, with no protection or benefits. […] Facing up to the challenge of interdisciplinary studies in photography will require much painstaking reassessment of our educational assumptions, priorities, and methodologies. It will also require drastic, even brutal, upgrading of the typically minimal and mediocre standards of research, preparation, thinking and articulation to which students of photography are presently held. No part of that process will make anyone involved in it happy. But there is no way of avoiding that challenge without becoming irrelevant to the medium’s future. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014All content of this publication is © copyright 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 by A. D. Coleman unless otherwise noted. All materials contained on this site are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced for commercial purposes without prior written permission. All photos copyright by the individual photographers. "Fair use" allows quotation of excerpts of textual material from this site for educational and other noncommercial purposes.
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Getty Images Caught Red-Handed (Again)
It would certainly behoove public-domain image archives, such as the Library of Congress, to demand collectively a forensic inquiry into the inventory of Getty Images and other such aggregators. The Carol Highsmith and Daniel Morel cases, I’ll wager, represent only the tip of Getty Images’ deceptive and illegal traffic in copyright-free images. […]