Response to New York Times article

"In the New York Times article, the author writes: 'Indeed a manipulated image, which is often more powerful than the sum of its parts, can affect not just visual perception, but opinions as well.' Reflect on this statement. What specific power do photos have to tell the truth? Are there specific guidelines that we should follow? What limitations should there be on image manipulations, posed events, and other types of fakey? What counts as manipulation, and what counts as reasonable editing, cropping or enhancement?"

Photos used to be a powerful piece of evidence, because it was a irrefutable piece of material that could display the guilt or innocent of someone much more clearly and plainly than other items of evidence. They could capture a moment in time, and display it at a later date to many more people who were not intended to see the original moment. However, with today's technology, photographs are losing much of the influence they used to have, because it is now not difficult for them to be altered to spliced together to display a false image, and it reaching the point were fake photographs can be produced with no way to detect that they have been tampered with.
It would be hard to create and enforce laws that would put limits of photo manipulation in media, because of its rampant use today, it would be similar to trying to impose prohibition in the 1920's.
The line between manipulating an image to where it is false, and reasonable editing, is hard to distinguish. I believe that the best way to ensure that people receive truth when viewing magazine and newspapers, would be to impose laws that require either a small thumbnail of the original image on the corner, or a larger image on the back of the publishing for every image that has been computer manipulated. Also, a small description of what manipulations have been performed should be mentioned, eg light darkened, cleavage enhanced, ect. While it seems unlikely this will happen, I believe it is a great way to ensure that people receive the truth about images, and don't receive false impressions about the subjects in the pictures.


It would be hard to create limitations for photo manipulation, due to the range of manipulations that can be created,and almost impossible to enforce them