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The camera can lie — sometimes

Hasan Suroor

What the "eye" sees is not always what it looks like, thanks to the many ways in which a camera can be manipulated.

MUCH TO their annoyance, pen-pushers are routinely reminded that a picture is worth a thousand words — except that sometime they can be the wrong "words" as happened last week when Reuters was forced to withdraw more than 900 pictures taken by a freelance photographer after it was suspected that that he had "doctored" two recent photographs of the Israeli-Lebanon conflict.

In one picture, the smoke billowing from an apartment block after an Israeli air strike was allegedly thickened by the photographer, Adnan Hajj, to dramatise the impact of the bombardment — and in another two flares were suspected to have been added to an image of an Israeli jet in action over Lebanon.

The allegation of doctoring, first made by several bloggers, was confirmed by Reuters after an in-house investigation. Mr. Hajj, who has sold pictures to Reuters for more than 10 years, denied manipulating the two photographs and attributed the thick smoke in the first picture to "bad lighting" and the fact that he was "trying to remove dust marks." As for the second, he said, there was "no problem with it — not at all."

But Reuters was not convinced and said it was removing all of his pictures from its database and would not be using his services any more. "This represents a serious breach of Reuters' standards and we shall not be accepting or using pictures taken by him," the news agency said.

The idea that the camera never lies is as misleading as the notion that all statistics are meant to mislead. What the "eye" sees is not always what it looks like, thanks to the many ways in which, first, the camera and, then, the photograph can be — and is often — manipulated. Indeed, a photograph can be manipulated in more ways — and more effectively — to convey a false reality than it is possible to do through the written word. Ask any clever photographer and he will tell you the tricks camera can be made to play.

At a seminar recently, one journalist recalled how there was a time when British photographers, covering stories about famine or floods in Third World countries, would carry teddy bears with them in order to use them as prop for pictures supposedly showing that all that was left in a household, stricken by death and destruction, were children's toys.

"Typically, the photograph would show a sick child with a teddy bear lying by his or her side — or a teddy bear lying amid ruins of a hut destroyed by floods," she said. It never occurred to them that poor children in African villages did not play with teddy bears bought from Hamlyns, she pointed out.

In conflict situations, photographs and films have always served as more effective tools of propaganda than written accounts of a battle. And that is what could be happening in Israel and Lebanon. "As with any conflict, photographers are at the heart of the propaganda war — with both sides attempting to use the power of the camera to their own ends," Steve Herrmann, editor of the BBC news website.

Minor infractions

Mr. Hajj's professional infractions — essentially touching up the photographs — are rather minor compared to some of the things that have been done in previous wars. Mr. Hajj's photographs were neither politically nor militarily significant in the sense that they were not likely either to change the course of the conflict or influence international opinion in a decisive way.

On the other hand, it is now publicly acknowledged that both sides in the two World Wars staged photographs either with a view to exaggerating the cruelty of the "enemy" — or to highlight the bravery of their own troops. Or both. The aim was to motivate their troops on the one hand, and boost morale back home in the face of depressing news reports from the war fronts.

Indeed, after the current conflict is over historians might one day stumble upon many more "doctored" photographs that may have been fed by the two sides as part of their propaganda war.

Even in peace time, the camera is often manipulated to create dramatic visual impact.

After Indira Gandhi lost the post-Emergency election in 1977, The Statesman carried a huge photograph by a reputed photographer on its front page showing a cleaner sweeping away election posters bearing Indira Gandhi's photograph. The image of a fallen leader being swept into the dustbin of history was not only visually arresting but also politically telling. In one stroke that photograph summed up what might have taken a thousand words to say. But questions were raised: had the photographer really come upon such a "neatly" loaded situation or had he been a bit "creative"? Should we salute him for his "creative" genius or question the picture's genesis. He has maintained that he simply shot what he saw.

One of the world's most controversial instances of photo/film editing remains a scene from Russian film maker Sergei Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin. In that scene, recreation of a supposedly actual event and shot on the steps of Odessa, there is a stampede as a crowd of ordinary people, including old women and little children, tries to escape military firing. It is one of the most celebrated scenes in the history of world cinema and is taught as a text to students of film editing. Yet questions have been raised about the location as well as the editing techniques.

So, relax, Mr. Hajj. It is the camera, stupid.

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