Nearby Café Home > Art & Photography > Photocritic International

Get new posts by email:
Follow me on Mastodon: @adcoleman@hcommons.social     Mastodon logo

NY Times Photo Ethics Policy Meets Edgar Martins

Martins’s contract stipulated digitally unaltered images (beyond the minimal tweaking described in the above memo), and he repeatedly asserted to Times staffers — including the writer of the accompanying Times Magazine article, several editors, and the fact checker at the magazine — that his images conformed to those guidelines. Where I come from, we call that lying, when its source is a photographer commissioned to document the real estate bust. Reading Martins’s own “annotations” of his now-controversial images, it seems clear that he felt free to exercise extreme license in montaging and altering his illustrations, rationalizing this activity with a logic and vocabulary far more commonplace in the discourse around creative photography than in that related to photojournalism and documentary work. […]