AP Severs Ties With Photographer Who Altered Work

The Associated Press ^ | Wednesday, January 22, 2014

[kristinn]

NEW YORK (AP) — The Associated Press has severed ties with a freelance photographer who it says violated its ethical standards by altering a photo he took while covering the war in Syria in 2013.

The news service said Wednesday that Narciso Contreras recently told its editors that he manipulated a digital picture of a Syrian rebel fighter taken last September, using software to remove a colleague's video camera from the lower left corner of the frame. That led AP to review all of the nearly 500 photos Contreras has filed since he began working for the news service in 2012. No other instances of alteration were uncovered, said Santiago Lyon, the news service's vice president and director of photography.

Contreras was one of a team of photographers working for the AP who shared in a Pulitzer last year for images of the Syrian war. None of the images in that package were found to be compromised, according to the AP.

AP said it has severed its relationship with Contreras and will remove all of his images from its publicly available photo archive. The alteration breached AP's requirements for truth and accuracy even though it involved a corner of the image with little news importance, Lyon said.

[SunkenCiv]

> Narciso Contreras recently told its editors that he manipulated a digital picture of a Syrian rebel fighter taken last September, using software to remove a colleague’s video camera from the lower left corner of the frame.

That’s an interesting change of policy at AP, eh? This alteration gets the “who gives a ####” award. Thanks kristinn.

[SZonian]

Why is grandpa and grandma’s heads practically washed out because of lighting, but his isn’t?

There’s just something very odd about that photo...

[COBOL2Java]

Remember these?

The Adnan Hajj photographs controversy (also called Reutersgate) involves digitally manipulated photographs taken by Adnan Hajj, a Lebanese freelance photographer based in the Middle East, who had worked for Reuters over a period of more than ten years. Hajj's photographs were presented as part of Reuters' news coverage of the 2006 Israel–Lebanon conflict, but Reuters has admitted that at least two were significantly altered before being published.

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The second manipulated image was reported by the pseudonymous blogger "Dr. Rusty Shackleford" on his blog "the Jawa Report". Reuters captioned it as showing an Israeli F-16 fighter jet firing ground-attack missiles "during an air strike on Nabatiyeh", but the F-16 was actually deploying one defensive flare, and the original photograph showed only one flare. The photo had been doctored to increase the number of flares falling from the F-16 from one to three, and misidentified them as missiles.