When does a photographer risk a breach of ethics in posing a picture or shooting a re-enactment of a scene?
That's a classic question in photojournalism. It sharpened for me last week when a Deseret News story noted my faulty recollection of how AP photographer Joe Rosenthal explained the taking of that magnificent Iwo Jima flag-raising picture. It has special piquancy now that we are so concerned with staging and re-enactments on TV news.- ALL PHOTOGRAPHERS compose and arrange by selecting their angle, scope, depth of field, lighting or other elements they can control.
Furthermore, as everyone in news work knows, the vast majority of published photos are not pictures of opportunity but rather arranged shots. The photographer poses his subjects but tries to make the scene look unposed, the "posed-unposed" look. Readers understand, I believe, that a photographer didn't just walk into a classroom and grab that appealing scene of children working on Christmas gifts, but rather grouped the kids. Grab shots usually are disappointing.
According to the Time magazine photojournalism special issue I cited in the column item in question, Life at first refused to use the Iwo Jima picture because it looked posed.
Of course, most Life picture stories were carefully planned and scripted. They had to be. But where action in a breaking-news event is photographed, the ethical problems of posing are more complicated. It is reprehensible for a news photographer to coach people into actions they were not taking and would not take except for the presence of the camera, to stage a phony event, or to alter the event and so to deceive.
- NOW CONSIDER the following cases:
- A photographer gets a shot of a flood victim trudging up a highway, hugging a pack of belongings, while a river rises ominously in the background.
The lensman asks the person to stop, backs up a few feet, reshoots, then rearranges his position. He asks the victim to swing the pack up on his back. Then he takes another photo. All of the shots are wonderful, perfectly encapsulating the event in one powerful image. Shots two and three are in effect restaged. Are they kosher?
- A photographer arrives out of breath at a groundbreaking ceremony moments after the happy participants have spaded out their symbolic shovelsful of earth. He asks them to re-enact the scene for his camera. They oblige.
- In the glow of his 1948 election victory, President Truman appears on his train platform in Chicago. A reporter thrusts a copy of the Chicago Tribune into his hands. His photographer then gets a fabulous photo of Truman beaming while holding up the early edition, which banners, "Dewey Defeats Truman."
- I'M NOT BOTHERED by any of those cases, and I don't think Rosenthal would be, either. He has spent a lifetime telling people his Iwo Jima picture was not posed, or "defending" himself against "accusations," as the Deseret News put it, though his place in the pantheon of great photographers is secure. He also bridles at any suggestion that he took a second flag-raising shot, though that would have been standard technique.
But Rosenthal told the New Yorker magazine less than two months after he made the epic photo, "It wouldn't have been a disgrace at all to have figured out a composition like that. But it just happened I didn't. Good luck was with me, that's all - the wind rippling the flag right, the men in fine positions and the day clear enough to bring everything into sharp focus."
A standard photojournalism textbook says, "Many news photographers feel that some assignments cannot be satisfactorily completed without some direction of the subject to achieve an arrangement that will not distort the truth but will make the truth evident. . . . Getting the right (and truthful) pose and expression is often a difficult problem but one the photojournalist accepts as a challenge. . . ."
- SAYS THE GREAT photojournalist Arthur Rothstein: "The reenactment of a news event is a problem for every photographer's conscience. It can be resolved only when the photographer honestly believes that his directions are creating a true picture of what actually happened. Direction by the photographer supposes a conception of what the final print will be like. It should add to the realism of each picture by coordinating the events or subjects before the camera to make the visual impact more effective."
While Rothstein also says posing has its greatest value "when its processes are least discernible," I have always argued that if there's any question of veracity, the photographer should be up-front with the reader and explain in the caption that the photo was a re-enactment or was posed.
The News article about my goof in saying Rosenthal took an additional picture of the flag-raising was generous enough to note briefly two reasons for the persistent confusion on this point. The first was that the flag-raising was the second that morning. The first occurred an hour and a half earlier and was recorded by a Marine Corps photographer. The other reason was that Rosenthal himself said he had taken other photos at the second flag raising. He later amplified this, saying he meant photos of the Marines jubilating around the flagpole, not raising it.
Was Rosenthal out of bounds in getting 20 or 30 Marines to crowd around so he could photograph them cheering, after the flagpole went up? No. Was it fakery in the sense it was untrue to the event? Hardly. Was he composing the flag-raising picture when he piled up some stones and a sandbag to give himself two more feet of height from which to shoot? Certainly. Did it detract from the truth? Certainly not.