Hypothetical Questions

OTA*

The study of ethics often deals with hypothetical questions, and it's always exasperating when people refuse to grasp that the conditions of a hypothetical question are provisional. For instance:

Questioner: If the world were going to end tomorrow, would you take the day off from work?

Respondant: The world's not going to end tomorrow.

Sigh.

(The answer is non-responsive, of course. The whole point of making a question hypothetical is so you don't have to get sidetracked arguing about the premises and conditions. Don't they teach this in schools?)

Amateur beekeeper pouring bees into a hive. Photo by smthng (used with permission)

Anyway, you've probably heard of an emerging potential crisis that's just beginning to catch the world's attention—colony collapse disorder (CCD). To make a long story short, bees are disappearing—abruptly, mysteriously, and in large numbers.

This issue about the bees is going to be interesting, and most of the questions I have are (as usual) hypothetical. If (provisional condition), as the most recent research suggests, it turns out that cell phones are responsible for CCD, and if (additional provisional condition) it could be demonstrated that this syndrome were going to be total, causing the collapse of human agriculture and resulting in widespread starvation, would the world's governments have the will to ban cell phones and destroy the cell phone industry? Or would we politicize the premises and gab our way straight to perdition? Hypothetical question.

One premise here that's not conditional is the importance of bees. Not to nature—to us. Here's something Albert Einstein supposedly said: "No bees, no food for mankind. The bee is the basis of life on this earth." Another quote ascribed to Einstein: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."

The content of these statements is true enough—bees are essential to agriculture—but the arguments over the premises are going to be fierce. What's killing the bees? (Genetically modified crops and pesticides have also come under scrutiny for blame.) How important are bees? Unlike, say, puppies, or panda bears, most people don't have any attachment to bees. There's no helpful sentimental construct or anthropomorphic link to fit them to. (Another small trouble is that it's doubtful Einstein ever made the abovementioned statements, at least according to his most recent biographer, Walter Isaacson, former editor of TIME magazine. Einstein is one of the most frequent misattributions for quotations; whenever someone has some point to make that needs the indisputable imprimatur of science, one quick and easy way to secure such an endorsement is to ascribe it to Einstein. What they're trying to do is subvert the idiotic arguments about premises we should all know well enough to take for granted.)

When the premise seems absurd—and you only wish it were
The other side of this coin is illustrated heartrendingly by some of the responses to the calamity Monday at Virginia Tech. An item from the New York Times: "'As a parent, I am totally outraged,' said Fran Bernhards of Sterling, Va., whose daughter Kirsten attends Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, as it is formally known. 'I would like to know why the university did not immediately shut down.'"

Before the fact, the hypothetical would have had to have been constructed like this: "If you knew in advance that a shadowy anonymous murderer were going to go on a killing rampage unprecendented in modern society hours after either he or someone else murdered two people in a dorm room, would you try to close down a thriving institution of some 34,000 people (24,000 students, 10,000 university employees) after the first two murders had occurred?"

I suppose you might, although we could argue as to whether such a move would be either feasible or effective. The problem with the question is that, lacking foreknowledge, any sane person would simply have to dispute the stated condition. As a premise, it appears to be nearly as absurd as saying "If the world were going to end tomorrow...." There's utterly no way anyone could have foreseen that 30 more murders would follow the first two. Not only is it atypical, it had literally never happened before. Murders happen every day; like it or not, they do. But the police aren't in the habit of shutting down a whole city or town after a single murder, and you can't shut down a whole huge campus after two, either. It wouldn't be rational. In advance of the event, it barely makes sense even to consider it...except as a hypothetical.

If only that's all it had been. Fran Bernhards' outrage is completely understandable, but its nature is psychological—it's the result of fear and a desperate desire to believe that the horrific event of Monday was a) foreseeable and b) preventable, if only someone who should have known better or done something differently had acted in a different way. It's a desperately fond hope, something most of us would dearly love to be able to believe. Regrettably, the more probable reality is that random violence of such magnitude is unforeseeable and unpreventable, rather than the result of a essentially benevolent authority simply making a mistake.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

*Off-topic alert

ADDENDUM: I've disallowed a number of the comments about bees. Not because I don't appreciate learning about them, but because I'm feeling a bit...wounded. Rightly or wrongly, I fancy that I'm at least a fair-to-middling writer, with an above-average ability to express myself clearly. But here in this post I went way out of my way to explain exactly how, and why, my hypothetical question was not about bees. It was about responses to threats.

You know, like how the first question is not about whether the world will end tomorrow?

I guess that was not clear. I suppose I am not as articulate as I think I am. (Actually, for many years, one of the words I could never quite remember, and thus typically stumbed over in conversation, was "articulate." Maybe the gods were trying to tell me something?)

Anyway, thank you, but let's talk about the bees some other time. VT was what was really on my mind.

Incidentally...

Incidentally #1: Re books, I've finished the second edition of The Empirical Photographer, and it includes the "chronicle of childhood" article that Michael so kindly mentions in the comments to the post below. Unfortunately, I've been stuck with a "font not embedded" error from Lulu, despite the fact that all fonts are supposedly properly embedded (and checked and rechecked), so I'm kind of stuck. I'd work on it, if I knew what to do....

Incidentally #2: So many people said nice things about the "Wallpaper" shot from a few days ago that it is now officially included in my Four States project. It's now "Indiana #1." And thanks for the encouragement!

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Anthologies Old and New

Somewhere on the internet, somebody seems to be discussing my old book, Lenses and the Light-Tight Box. I only know because I've gotten a half dozen queries about it out of the blue recently. It is indeed still available from Lulu.

And I've just reduced the price from $27.00 to $19.99.

The book is a collection of some of my old magazine articles about cameras and lenses. Included are a history of Canon that Canon USA reprinted and distributed for free for a number of years; an article about choosing an arsenal of lenses; an explanation of how to read technical lens tests; a comparison of Canon's and Nikon's corporate philosophies; and "Leicaphilia," an encomium to the lore of the Leica. There are 21 chapters in all. The book is 8.5 x 11", about 60,000 words, 153 pages, and it's illustrated, although the reproduction quality isn't anything to write home about. Also, it's not scheduled for a second edition. (I only wish I could justify the time.)

It doesn't include any of the 36 editorials I wrote when I was Editor of Photo Techniques, the 100+ columns I wrote for "The Sunday Morning Photographer," the going-on-60 columns I've now written for the English Black & White Photography magazine, or anything I've written on this blog. Hmm, might be time for a new anthology....

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

How Photojournalism Is

"A news photograph is a statement, like a spoken or written one, subject to interpretation and evaluation, but as capable of being honest as any verbal statement...."

I had to scrounge long and hard to find an clear example of image manipulation in my files, but here it is—this is a paperback book cover I once did, and below it the original file.


As you can see, I've taken some liberties with reporting the telephone pole that was sprouting from the golfer's neck. (You can click on either image to examine them more closely.) Of course in my usage of this picture here, it falls solidly into the category of photo-illustration, not reportage. But it makes a nice, if modest, point: that even a very minor change is enough to cross the yawning chasm that's supposed to exist between photo-illustration and reportage.

In my experience, some people never learn how to really look at photojournalism, because they're too preoccupied with pictorial prettiness; they get distracted by the ugly details and bad juxtapositions and the sometimes poor technique of photojournalistic pictures. You need to learn to see past that stuff to see into the essence of what's being reported. (And by the way, I certainly can't agree with the commenters who've asserted that every photograph is a fiction, any more than I believe that reality is a dream. A news photograph is a statement, like a spoken or written one, subject to interpretation and evaluation, but as capable of being honest as any verbal statement.) Photojournalism is rougher, rawer, often less organized and composed. That's natural. It's just a different form of photography.

One thing that I count among our losses these days is something that I seldom see mentioned. It's become a truism that photographs have always been doctored, were often faked, and always had the potential to be false, and that's true—but it's also true that deceit in an analog photograph was much harder to accomplish and much easier to detect. Consequently, one of the chief aims and rare prizes of photography was finding real situations that were visually remarkable—it was that assumption that the things photographed existed in the world just the way they looked that lent them much of their charm and strangeness. Now, of course, with so many more "images" become naught but photo-illustrations, so much less transparently, this manner of enjoying pictures has been diminished.

As an (again, modest) example of what I'm talking about, consider the picture to the left. I think it's funny only because it's true. In the days of analog, the joke would have been difficult to fake in "post," at least without a fairly onerous amount of work. It would be trivial to create the joke in post-processing with digital. (What joke? Click on the picture and look at the license plate.) In this case it's pictured just as I saw it—no manipulation. How do you know? Because I said so, and ultimately you either take my word where my "statements" are concerned, or you decide not to. That's how it is with photojournalism.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Featured Comment by Blork: The statement that "all photographs are lies" is useful for people who like to sit up all night in (formerly) smoky cafés pondering metaphysics, but it isn't useful for determining guidelines in the "real world" for the separation of photography and photo illustration.

Mike, you said "some people never learn how to really look at photojournalism." I would amend that to "many people never learn how to look at photographs."

Not to be overly cynical, but photography is the "easy art"—particularly these days, with the ubiquity of digital. So we're working in a medium that is saturated with millions of essentially meaningless images. We're inundated with photographic images in newspapers, magazines, online, on billboards, sidewalk advertising, etc. Everybody and his dog has a digital camera and is uploading to Flickr and similar sites. Thousands of "photo a day" photo blogs are out there, where people post a photo every day, whether they have something worth posting or not.

What gets lost in there is the idea of contemplating the image. As you say, people get hung up on "prettiness," so endless overprocessed HDR images get more eyeballs and are more highly ranked than images that are actually about something but require more than three seconds of eyeball time to "get."

Oh dear. I think I'm falling into a rant, so I'll stop right there. Suffice to say that your removal of the offending pole in the book cover image is a non-issue. The photo is "about" setting the stage for a golf book; it's not about that specific person on that specific hole at that specific time.

Adobe Tackles Photo Forgeries

Adnan Hajj's infamous "cloned smoke" photograph that got him fired from Reuters News Service in 2006. Kind of makes you wonder if he would have gotten away with it if he'd simply done a better job....*

by Randy Dotinga, WIRED

A suite of photo-authentication tools under development by Adobe Systems could make it possible to match a digital photo to the camera that shot it, and to detect some improper manipulation of images, Wired News has learned.

Adobe plans to start rolling out the technology in a number of photo-authentication plug-ins for its Photoshop product beginning as early as 2008. The company is working with a leading digital forgery specialist at Dartmouth College, who met with the Associated Press last month.

(Click here for a gallery of famous fake photos.)

The push follows a media scandal over a doctored war photograph published by Reuters last year. The news agency has since announced that it's working with both Adobe and Canon to come up with ways to prevent a recurrence of the incident....

READ ON

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, thanks to Mark

*Caption by T.O.P. is not from the WIRED article.

Detrich Update

This is an update to our post "Detrich Resigns" from April 10th.

Following an investigation by the Toledo Blade, explained by Blade Vice President and Executive Editor Ron Royhab on toledoblade.com, it now appears that Allan Detrich might have been more in the habit of altering photographs than he was willing to admit. An excerpt from Royhab's article:

"An intensive investigation of Mr. Detrich's work, conducted by Nate Parsons, The Blade's director of photography, found that since January of this year, Mr. Detrich submitted 947 photographs for publication, of which 79 had been digitally altered.

"Twenty-seven of the altered photographs were published both in the newspaper and on toledoblade.com, and an additional 31 were published only on toledoblade.com. Another 21 altered photographs submitted by Mr. Detrich were not published.

"The changes Mr. Detrich made included erasing people, tree limbs, utility poles, electrical wires, electrical outlets, and other background elements from photographs. In other cases, he added elements such as tree branches and shrubbery.

"Mr. Detrich also submitted two sports photographs in which items were inserted. In one he added a hockey puck and in the other he added a basketball, each hanging in mid-air. Neither was published.

"The Blade is removing all of Mr. Detrich's photographs from toledoblade.com and blocked access to any of his photographs in the newspaper's archive. Like many other newspapers, The Blade shares its work with the Associated Press, an international news cooperative. On April 6, the AP removed all 50 of Mr. Detrich's photographs from its archives.

"Honesty is the fundamental value in journalism."


This also would seem to render Detrich's defense of his actions (in his blog) to be itself deceitful.

Mr. Royhab goes on to cite the NPPA's Digital Manipulation Code of Ethics, which he says Detrich signed. It states:

"As journalists we believe the guiding principle of our profession is accuracy; therefore, we believe it is wrong to alter the content of a photograph in any way that deceives the public.

"As photojournalists, we have the responsibility to document society and to preserve its images as a matter of historical record. It is clear that the emerging electronic technologies provide new challenges to the integrity of photographic images...in light of this, we the National Press Photographers Association, reaffirm the basis of our ethics: Accurate representation is the benchmark of our profession. We believe photojournalistic guidelines for fair and accurate reporting should be the criteria for judging what may be done electronically to a photograph. Altering the editorial content...is a breach of the ethical standards recognized by the NPPA."

Update posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, thanks to bomath

Jim Johnson's Son

Weighing heavily on our thoughts today is the freakish accidental death of Jeff Milano-Johnson, 14-year-old son of "Politics, Theory & Photography" blogger Jim Johnson. As the father of a 14-year-old boy myself, I can't (or perhaps won't allow myself to) imagine it. My thoughts are with Jim and his family.

(My heart also goes out to the young player whose action led to the result, who might have his own demons to wrestle with.)

As an organ donor, Jeffrey Milano-Johnson saved or prolonged other lives, and gave hope and joy to the families of transplant patients facing death or debility. Although this is but a consolation to Jim and his family, no doubt, it is still a noble one.

We hope Jim will return to his blog's mission when he's ready to.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, with thanks to Stan Banos