Photojournalism
Photojournalism is basically messages that are portrayed in
pictures to be shown to the society; usually this is shown through the media
such as newspapers and news. In the photojournalism field, the main concern
involves the ethics; there are set of rules that needs to be followed. Altering
the pictures can affect the views and perception of the image such. For
example;
This picture clearly shows how photo manipulation in
journalism can affect our views; this picture shows manipulation by cropping
one part of the picture. Moreover the alteration in saturation to a black and
white image gives the impression that the sitting soldier is injured. The cropped
picture on the left connotes the idea that the army showing violence towards an
unarmed soldier by the pointing of the rifle to the head. However on the right,
shows heroism of the U.S army, moreover. But in actuality the picture as a
whole only connotes the altruistic behaviour of U.S soldiers towards a captured
enemy soldier. The picture should have been released as the photographer
originally captured it. The alteration will persuade the audience into a false
impression thus making it unethical.
It
is said that the media has to be entertaining as it is truthful, and I find
that this 2 can coexist in the world of photojournalism. It is important that
the ethics needs to be followed, and to achieve an entertaining and truthful
photo can be done if the photographer follows the rules of syntactic lines of
composition, this enables the audience to be more appealed to the picture, and to
make it truthful takes skills, patience and timing in capturing it, so it is
more towards the individual choice of the photographers to either cheat or do
it honestly like a true photographer. Altering the picture to achieve how the
photographer wants it to be is basically lying blatantly to the us, the public.