Clicking a phony tale: Ace photographer Steve McCurry admits to altering images
We usually believe photos. But how does one find out if a particular photo depicts reality or has been staged? A recent incident brought to light that staging photographs is real, and even award-winning photographers like Steve McCurry have been accused of practising it.
A badly photoshopped image by Steve spotted at a show in Italy recently landed the photographer in controversy. Steve has also gone on to admit that one of the photos used in a National Geographic issue in 1984, clicked during the monsoon season in India, had been photoshopped to add more water. In an interview to TIME, he said that “it was appropriate because the truth and integrity of the picture were maintained”.
He later went on to call himself a storyteller and not a photojournalist, clarifying his stand on the issue. Magnum Photos, meanwhile, has since removed several of Steve’s images from their website.
But is manipulating photos in the name of art justified? With technology advancing so much, can we now believe everything that we see in a photo?
An enraged Aditya Arya says, “Everyone who worshipped McCurry or thought highly of him is very disappointed with what he’s done. This is something I have been talking about for the last two decades and have always felt that someone should take his images and analyse them.”
Addressing the ethics of manipulating a photograph within the larger, unwritten code of photography as an art, he opines, “As a photographer you are allowed to manipulate to the extent that the content of the picture does not change. You can dodge, print, control certain shades... basic enhancements like that is fine. But here comes this gentleman who, for so many years as a photographer, has given interviews talking about representing the ‘true image’ and nothing but the ‘truth’.
Today, his Wikipedia is suddenly altered to say that he is not, in fact, a photojournalist or documentary photographer but a storyteller. And storytellers weave stories — they don’t represent the truth.
There are many more of his images that have been leaked now, and what he has done in them is totally unethical. The image of the Taj Mahal and the train, for instance... he paid the railways to shunt that engine on that track to create the image.
“Now, as a photographer, I do have tremendous respect for his skills to create images but the point is that this was not his genre. People looked up to him as someone who would portray the ‘true’ India.”
Ace photographer Sudhir Kasliwal who has worked with Steve McCurry for almost 30 years, meanwhile feels that there is no image manipulation in Steve’s images.
“We have gone out for assignments and I have seen that he loves his craft... he is not one of those who would manipulate images to earn fame. This is unnecessary furore created by the anti-Steve community.”
Expressing his views on image manipulation, Kasliwal elaborates, “I saw all the images shot by Steve that claim to have been manipulated, very carefully, but there is hardly any alteration that I could spot except in one where an entire figure has been removed. I personally think that this could be a series of shots too — when you shoot, you don’t shoot one image, so the so-called manipulated images are just multiple shots of the same image and there is a possibility of people coming in and going out of the frame. In his other images, I see a minor enhancement of colour, so there is very little manipulation, if at all, there and that is totally acceptable.
“Entirely changing the subject and the story behind a picture or joining or superimposing two different pictures to make one is what I would call manipulation... if you feel a black and white background or coloured background is working for a certain image, then that is something fairly acceptable. These minor alterations have been prevalent ever since the pre-digital era and there is nothing ethically wrong about them.”
Award-winning photographer Sandesh Kadur adds, “If you are talking about photoshopping elements out of the picture, that is not photojournalism. Manipulating photos by adding or subtracting elements to an existing image is wrong.
“But enhancing it by adding more contrast, making it more real and saturated... bringing it closer to what your eyes could see through photoshop is not a problem. Cropping and removal of dust spots is allowed too. Staging is not photojournalism. You can even say that the photo of the famous Afghan girl could have been staged — he might have probably got her to sit down in a place that had lights bouncing, etc., but it’s still in the context of the said refugee camp. But I can’t say how far down the road you can take staging to.”
Inputs from Neha Jha, Nandini Tripathy and Aditi Pancholi
