NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON'T

I love magazines... even old ones. Or maybe that should read, especially old ones.

I have been a collector of the major food magazines since the mid 1960's... Gourmet, Bon Appetit, Food and Wine, Chocolatier, and Saveur.
I even have a Gourmet magazine that features our own chef in residence... Boris!
Had no idea until he told me about it! Way to go Boris!

A friend was recently moving and gave me a stack of News Photographer magazines.
I had never seen this magazine before and am having fun looking at the photos and stories.
One particular story caught my attention as I vividly remember the photo when it was published. The year was 1989.

The photo was of a firefighter rescuing a little girl from a fire and trying to resuscitate her. Sadly, she died several days later in the hospital.
It was a powerful image taken by an amateur photographer, Ron Olshwanger.
And further more, it won a Pulitzer Prize!

Now this is the interesting part. Ron is not a professional photographer.
He was a guy with a camera, at the right place, at the right time.
In an interview he said he enjoyed photography as his regular job as a furniture salesman was boring.

The ethics of newspaper publishing comes into play here when the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a photo of Ron with his winning photo accompanied by his wife and on the table was a can of diet Coke.

A decision was made by several of the people with the newspaper including director of technology Robert C. Holt III, to digitally remove the can of coke.
It was the first time that the paper had ever altered a photograph.
Holt later said "the incident teaches editors and photographers that no one is impervious to the incredibly powerful tools of electronic manipulation. All photographers change reality somewhat by using different types of lenses or dodging and burning. Electronic manipulation is more insidious because it takes those tools and multiplies them by 10,000."

He also said "It is clearly taboo to intentionally tell a falsehood by changing the visual image."

To my mind... these magazines are keepers.
They are filled with so many examples of the ethics of news photography and certainly are just as appropriate in today's world and every issue has phenomenal photojournalism.