Audubon Magazine Ethics Article Jan/Feb 1998

[anthonty_debase]

Various issues relating to the ethics of nature photography have been debated in this forum and others over the past years.

 

<p>

 

The current issue of Audubon magazine (Jan/Feb 1998) has an article that makes a great primer for those of us who are still unsure what this great debate is about and how past events have brought us to this point. The article is entitled: Reality Check and is written by Edwin Dobb.

 

<p>

 

Mr. Dobb covers some early controversies such as Art Wolfe's Migrations: Wildlife in Motion book, National Geographic's moving pyramids, Marty Stouffer's wildlife documentaries and the recent Doubletake magazine article. In my opinion the article covers these issues in a fair way.

 

<p>

 

One point that hit home with me was a comment by an editor of National Geographic that digital manipulation unlike earlier advances in photographic technology "is not taking us closer to reality, but farther from it". He is refering to the destruction of the trust that the public places in photographic images and how thay may effect the messages we try to send. For example, they show the Frans Lanting photograph of elephants and a bird that many people assumed was digitally altered to include the bird, elephants, or sky. Lanting actually made the image after repeatedly going back and standing in the muck for hours.

 

<p>

 

The article also discusses the difference between digitally enhancing an image and digitally altering it, and using captured and baited animals instead of truly wild animals.

[don_baccus]

In more modest circles, our own underwater photographer extraordinaire was accused of digitally faking a photograph (sharks and a ship's mast that looked cross-like) either here or on the sunrise photo critique site. Distrust of unreal-seeming photographs is probably here to stay.

[mark___1]

Thanks for mentioning the article Anthony. I will pick it up. I have been following the various discussion on these topics with interest, this article sounds like a good read.

 

<p>

 

Mark

[frank_kolwicz]

NANPA, of which I am a member, started a discussion of this topic a year or so ago with an article in the newsletter "Currents". I responded with a long, detailled letter addressed to Michael Francis, Chair of the Ethics Committee supposedly addressing the issue. I was rather surprised that I didn't even receive an acknowledgement of their receipt of my letter. Later this year, the Newsletter carried some remarks that seemed to indicate that NANPA was backing-off on the whole issue and I haven't read anything at all lately. Perhaps the Audubon article contained some inkling of what happened at NANPA: Mr. Francis happens to be a photographer who is financially interested in which way the argument goes: according to Audubon's article his "passion is large animal photography" and that he "volunteered to cochair NANPA's ethics committee in part to make sure that game-farm animals would be recognized as legitimate subjects" and, maybe, he didn't like the tone of my letter, which was very stongly in favor of disclosure at all levels and also pointed out that the real problem is that photographers who do more or less "faked" images want to be able to market them right along with truly wild images and not be excluded from even a small portion of the crowded market. So, I expect that my effort got shit-canned, probably along woth a lot of other member's contributions.

 

<p>

 

BTW, I don't do large animal photography, I don't do digital imaging, I don't do darkroom manipulation and, actually, I don't do as much photography as I used to, either. So, I don't have a financial stake in the outcome. What I do have is an interest in maintaining whatever credibility photography still has as representing something that really happened in front of a camera, preferrably with a human eye and brain behind it.

 

<p>

 

Frank