Steve McCurry and post processing

[Brian Atherton]

No sour grapes from me, either.

I just find it rather depressing that a world-renowned photographer who states “photographer is my art” apparently did not take care and attention about was being done to his "art", and allow images this poorly manipulated and obvious onto the marketplace under his name.

From the Petapixel website; McCurry quote:
“I have taken steps to change procedures at my studio which will prevent something like this from happening again.”

No doubt the eagle-eyed will hold him to this. 😉

 

[maggieo]

From the Petapixel website; McCurry quote:
“I have taken steps to change procedures at my studio which will prevent something like this from happening again.”

No doubt the eagle-eyed will hold him to this. 😉

He may have just become the Gary Hart of photography. 😉

 

[CK Dexter Haven]

Surprised at the multiple mentions of "cropping," as if that's some sort of altering of truth. Every photograph you've ever taken was the result of cropping. You chose what to include or exclude. Makes no difference if you do it on the scene or in the Darkroom.

I also don't see such a difference between dodging and burning versus cloning out a lamp post. Just because the old masters had access to d/b but not cloning is no reason to suggest that dodging and burning isn't also a significant manipulation of truth. And, for that matter, so is shooting on black and white media.

Re McCurry - I've been a fan for a while. Not because I needed to trust that all of his images were strict journalistic depictions of reality, but because he captured or created beautiful scenes, rendered in a way that I would want to see the world. For me, they are as much about the fantasy of travel as any image in a travel magazine. Whether or not this Photoshop is a 'violation' of ethics, to me, depends on where they were published and in what context. It's up to the individual media to decide what is proper. But just saying he is a magnum photographer doesn't mean he can't manipulate. Elliott Erwitt also shoots commercially, and when you work for a paying client, that client can do what they need to do to the image to serve the 'product.' If McCurry shoots for nat geo, I would expect the images to be free of 'reconstruction'-type manipulations. If the images were published in his book, it's up to McCurry, and I don't see how removing a lamp post (or even a person) is a 'pictorial lie' of any significance.

I do not buy, however, the statement that he released.... It's easy to believe that a person who shoots so much volume would be unfamiliar with whether or not a lamp post had been present three months earlier, or if a group of people included 5 versus 6 figures, or if one of those figures, captured in 125th of a second had been in a slightly unfortunate position, compositionally. But, I don't believe a retoucher would be manipulating his images without his consent in a general sense. And if he had, that this fact hadn't been dicovered by McCurry at some point previously.

If anything, this gives me a bit more license to make things 'more perfect' in my personal work. And I'll remember to delete the original if I ever enter one of those contests....

 

[newsgrunt]

haha, if you ever place in World Press you better have that original file or neg otherwise say good bye to the award 😉

 

[Keith]

This explains a lot for me ... the eyes in this pic were obviously stolen from one of those Siberian huskies. Tricky darkroom work for sure but now that I've seen the light I can't think otherwise.

Jeez ... what a hack! :angel:

 

[michaelwj]

A friend of mine belongs to an amateur camera club, self-labelled a "Photographic Society". Like all camera clubs they hold regular competitions. Visiting judges and guest speakers often remark "(to make this picture better) you could drop in some clouds/birds" or "remove that unwanted power line".

Heaven forbid a Magnum photographer would do such a thing!

I had a cracker at a local club judging event. The judge (who I greatly admire) said my image had all the right elements in it, but "could be improved by standing in a different place and pressing the shutter at a different time". It cuts to the base of making a good image to me, and was the only time a judge in a photo competition said anything that made any difference to me. It sure is more fun than spending time in front of a computer - just take a better photo to start with.

I think this has something to do with my reaction to this news. Why didn't he just take a better picture? Did he just take a photo and think "I'll just get someone to make that shot work better later" and move on to the next place? It all seems a bit 'meh' to me. It takes the gloss off his previously untouchable work, and throws it all into question.

 

[jsrockit]

If he's doing photojournalism, then he shouldn't do this. If he's making art, then I see no issue. Have any of the photos in question been used a in a photojournalism setting or just in books / galleries?

 

[x-ray]

Here's something you might find interesting. Dorothia Lange retouched the thumd and index finger of the woman's hand out of the iconic image of the migrant mother and children photo. http://www.1adventure.com/archives/000203.html

Seems like everything goes to the extreme today.

 

[jsrockit]

Personally I have different expectations between the NY Times and National Geographic.

I do as well.

 

[emraphoto]

i always preferred Allard. just sayin'

 

[Ronald M]

Not that I condone picture alteration, but making a scapegoat of photographers and leaving print journalists and "TV news" unanswerable is quite unthinkable. They slant stories usually to the left , leave out facts, and plain fail to report at all.
Then there are the town hall meetings where the questions are preselected although they seem to be be random, well edited interviews with candidates, and presentations by various press secretaries where half answers are given and those make it into news.

And we wonder why newspapers are going bankrupt. Our democracy was founder on free and open press and speech and without it we fail, in fact it became the first amendment.

during my politically conscious span of life, say starting 1965, I have seen this all transpire. Short of a few up years, it has all been downhill and at an accelerating rate.
The founders really knew all the tricks government can play and they did their best to
"outlaw" them in the constitution which itself is now under serious attack.

People who try to stop some of the carnage, seem to mysteriously die. And I offer no details on purpose.

Somehow moving a pole or changing the background is minor compared to what is really happening .

I close with a quote from Joe Stalin, "It does not matter who votes, what matters is who counts the votes." Or who programs the ballot counting machines to bring it up to the modern age.

 

[telenous]

It's been a bad week for McCurry, that's for sure. First the NYT article paints him shallow, then this. The person who did the cloning in the first photo (the one with the stray leg), what was he thinking anyway? Such a complete and utter cock-up. It is so very, very poorly done, you have to wonder whether there is some kind of foul play behind it.

McCurry is obviously aware of the reputation damage, esp. with people from his client/fan base. (By comparison, no one from the field of conceptual photography is going to bat an eyelid, they have been saying all along that photographs are not truths). Hence his statement where, I thought, he attempts to contain the fallout of this story reasonably well (i.e. as well as one could do under the circumstances), by admitting responsibility but not ownership of the manipulation (which lies with the person in the studio who executed it) , and basically reasserts his documentarian ethos. But the controversy refuses to die out.

In a new opinion piece in Time magazine, the consistently thoughtful Peter van Agtmael discusses this situation.

See here: http://time.com/4326791/fact-truth-photography-steve-mccurry/

Interestingly, he brings in certain strands of thought that were discussed in the Teju Cole article in the NYT ("A Too Perfect Picture", NYT, Apr 3, 2016). As an aside, I am not so sure about the title of the article (which might have been inserted by a staffer in Time Magazine) since it is not fully compatible with what van Agtmael says in the article.

"Photography is an incredibly subjective craft. In the criticisms of McCurry, there were a lot of loaded words like ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’ being thrown around. I don’t really believe in these words. I’ve never met two people with the same truth, nor seen true objectivity ever demonstrably applied to anything. They are nice words, but remain aspirational and cloud a more nuanced interpretation of reality and history. We shouldn’t mistake something factual for something truthful, and we should always question which facts are employed, and how."

(P.van Agtmael, "Why Facts Aren't Always Truths in Photography", Time Magazine, 12.V.2016)

.

 

[sojournerphoto]

I wrote a long response, but lost it through inadvertent use of the 'back' button. However, the Google search for Steve McCurry lists stevemcurry.com as Steve McCurry, photojournalist. Even if his recent work has been made 'for his own enjoyment' when he sells it he is trading on this label. Therefore this is a deceit.

On a wider view, I think that it's a bit like performance enhancing drugs in athletics. Just because 'everyone is at it' doesn't mean it's not cheating/deception (otherwise just come out and say it). To do that for your own enjoyment is strikingly dim as you are accepting less than the best. I say this despite understanding the occasional experiments to see what you can achieve.

 

[BlackXList]

I feel like it will hopefully result in a much needed open discussion about what is and isn't acceptable, and while that seems obvious, with the media landscape changing so much, I don't think it hurts to address it semi frequently.

The only sticking point for me, is that the ridiculous Teju Cole article is getting so much more traffic.

 

[Huss]

Not that I condone picture alteration, but making a scapegoat of photographers and leaving print journalists and "TV news" unanswerable is quite unthinkable. They slant stories usually to the left , leave out facts, and plain fail to report at all.
Then there are the town hall meetings where the questions are preselected although they seem to be be random, well edited interviews with candidates, and presentations by various press secretaries where half answers are given and those make it into news.

And we wonder why newspapers are going bankrupt. Our democracy was founder on free and open press and speech and without it we fail, in fact it became the first amendment.

during my politically conscious span of life, say starting 1965, I have seen this all transpire. Short of a few up years, it has all been downhill and at an accelerating rate.
The founders really knew all the tricks government can play and they did their best to
"outlaw" them in the constitution which itself is now under serious attack.

People who try to stop some of the carnage, seem to mysteriously die. And I offer no details on purpose.

Somehow moving a pole or changing the background is minor compared to what is really happening .

I close with a quote from Joe Stalin, "It does not matter who votes, what matters is who counts the votes." Or who programs the ballot counting machines to bring it up to the modern age.

Very well thought out comment Ronald.

 

[JoeV]

All of this controversy over McCurry's photos is misplaced. It's not a photography issue, it's a journalism issue.

Photographs have never been faithful to the subject - that is their power: to appear to represent life-like reality while simultaneously being intrinsically deceptive, by the photographer's choice of where to put the frame lines and when to push the button.

The idea that an illustration to an article has to be faithful to some professional ethic is a problem of journalism, not photography, plain and simple. Journalism has "used" photography to sell copy for a century or more. And before photography was available, journalism used the opinionated view-point of professional illustrators and artists to represent a particular perspective on some foreign war or other event.

The sad thing about this McCurry brouhaha is that it displaces our attention away from the real culprits, which are corporate media, whose agenda might just not jive with our own interests. It serves to blame photography and photographers for what are essentially journalistic issues.

~Joe

 

[Nathan King]

Instead of shaking our fists in feigned outrage, I think the photographic community needs to use this as the starting point for a healthy and desperately needed conversation. From what I can gather none of the images in question were used for photojournalistic purposes. When do the strict constraints of photojournalism apply? Does a trusted name in photojournalism have the right to branch out into the fine art arena without explicitly informing consumers? Big names of the past have successfully straddled the line between photojournalism and fine art. Have consumers been erroneously pinning "trust" to a name when they should have been looking at what respected publishing agencies and media outlets were (and were not) publishing? Is the industry overemphasizing the idea of trust when photography, by its very nature, is a medium where the photographer can introduce bias to the story without retouching by choosing where to stand, what to include in an image, and when to take the image?

 

[DanskDynamit]

I think a Magnum photographer known for his documentary and PJ work has just destroyed his reputation (as a documentary photographer and photojournalist).

His only move now is to clearly state via Magnum that he no longer works in realism, but is an art and commercial photographer, which has lower standards of post-production.

I really loved his work. But seeing that he isn't just working harder than everyone else, but just improving image elements in the computer, leaves me turned off. I have lots of pictures that are good, but not great, because there are elements I didn't exclude (other people, power lines, etc.).

Now when I leaf through my McCurry book collection, I have to wonder whether the credit goes solely to Steve or one of his "retouchers."

+1
can't agree more.