Consider three images from the last couple of weeks:
1. President Barack Obama finishes his address announcing the killing of Osama Bin Laden and walks away from the cameras. After a brief break, he walks back down the same carpet and begins re-reading lines from the speech so that five photojournalists can snap shots of him. When distributing the images, many news organizations note that the photos of Obama were taken after the actual speech, but people often don’t notice the disclaimer. Yesterday, the White House announces that this practice of re-enactment would no longer take place.
2. In the days immediately after the announcement of the death of bin Laden, newspapers and other news organizations in different parts of the world publish a photo of what they declare is the face of the dead terrorist. It depicts him as blackened, bloodied and disfigured. It’s also a fake.
3. The White House releases an official photo showing President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other key members of the administration and military in the situation room as the raid on Bin Laden’s compound takes place. It’s published the world over, including by two ultra-Orthodox Jewish newspapers in Brooklyn. Except that for religious reasons Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Director for Counterterrorism Audrey Tomason are Photoshopped out of the image.
Three important, iconic images attached to a big story. The first was staged, the second was faked, and the third was later manipulated to remove key players from history. Taken together, they offer a powerful reminder of the challenges of determining visual authenticity in the age of Photoshop.
“There are two issues: First is the ease with which images can be manipulated; and in addition we’re seeing a sort of a slide into the consumer area where manipulation of images is becoming acceptable,” said Santiago Lyon, AP’s director of photography, echoing comments he made last month at the MIT Media Lab. “There is this sort of notion that image manipulation is somehow acceptable and I think that has very serious ramifications for the perception of the credibility of photojournalistic imagery, which has to be accurate and complete.”
While talking with Lyon, I realized I manipulate images a few times a week when I apply different filters to my Instagram photos. He also noted that today’s digital cameras often come with build-in features and filters that enhance and manipulate images with the push of a button. As for the capabilities of our home PCs, Microsoft dedicated a recent TV ad to selling the fact that you can swap out the heads of people in order to get the perfect family photo.
Photo manipulation—it’s not just for experts anymore!
Yes, the tools of image fabrication and manipulation are widely available and highly promoted. The skills to use them are easily attainable. If you are a professional designer or photographer or a dedicated amateur, the possibilities are endless, the handiwork increasingly difficult to identify.
But what about the tools and skills for detecting these manipulations before they spread online or are used by news organizations?
AFP and Tungstene
When it came to the fake photo of a dead Bin Laden, Agence France-Presse turned to Tungstene, a piece of software developed by Roger Cozien, a Paris-based criminology and photo analysis expert. (If you can read French, this story offers a detailed analysis of the faked photo. Caution: graphic images.)
Tungstene was described in a press release from AFP this week as “high-technology image interpretation software which combs through the information contained in digital images to detect potential tampering. Using a suite of filters, it can identify tell-tale discrepancies in pixels and analyse harmonisation of light and colour.”
The news agency announced it is using Tungstene to check certain photos for signs of manipulation or enhancement. As for AP, Lyon said they often turn to noted digital forensics expert Dr. Hany Farid when their internal experts require additional testing and analysis. (I contacted Reuters to see what they use, but didn’t receive a reply.)
Mladen Antonov, AFP’s photo editor-in-chief, told Stinky Journalism this week that part of the reason for implementing Tungstene was the growing use of images from social media and sources other than professional photographers.
“There are still parts of the world where journalists are not allowed to witness the events happening and we relay on hand-out images given often from the same regimes that close the doors for the independent press,” Antonov said. “In such cases all images are passing special tests.”
Lyon also said AP is increasingly handling and sourcing images from new kinds of sources, though it represents a small percentage of the photos it distributes.
Contacted in Paris, Cozien said the high end version of his analysis software takes roughly thirty minutes to process an image, and that this must be done by a trained analyst. (An extremely important image requiring the best possible evaluation can take twice that length, he said.) Roughly eight AFP employees in different parts of the world have been trained to use the software, according to Cozien.
“The software gives lots of results, but an operator has to analyze the results,” he said, comparing it to way a trained technician is required to operate an x-ray machine. “Anyone who buys the software needs to have the training and it [takes] at least one full week.”
A related product from Cozien’s company can batch process images and flag suspect files, which then need further examination. But the batches aren’t yet large enough to accommodate all of the images from a service like AFP, or the tens of thousands per day that flow through AP. At this moment in their evolution, photo analysis programs can only be used for spot checks or special situations. (On the bright side, at least that’s a more common use than what news organizations do when it comes to the widely-available plagiarism detection services.)
Human Factor
One key factor in detecting image manipulation is the human element, which is another reason why we’re unlikely to soon see wide scale use of photo analysis by news organizations.
“It’s beyond just the technical aspects of a photo,” Lyon said when explaining how his organization determines the authenticity of images sourced from citizens or those unfamiliar to AP.
Lyon listed a range of questions asked of the source of a photo when evaluating an image of unknown or undetermined origin: “Who is the photographer? Where were they? Why were they there? Do they have other images they can show us taken before and after the image we’re interested in? And what can we do to get certain questions answered about the provenance of the image that put us more at ease?”
Another reason the human factor is essential - and why asking questions of a source can often trump technical analysis - is the images themselves. Lyon said low resolution images, like those taken by cameras inside basic cell phones, are harder to analyze using software.
“The minute an image is lowered in resolution, that it falls under a certain threshold, it becomes almost impossible to run any kind of program to detect manipulation,” Lyon said. “A big image with a lot of detail can be more closely analyzed than an image of 60 or 70k…and so sometimes what happens, and this is a confusing aspect of it, on the Internet you get a lot of low res images floating around and it’s difficult to understand what’s been done to them and where they come from.”
The old cliché is that a picture is worth a thousand words. In today’s world of ubiquitous cameras and tools for photo manipulation, it seems a picture is also often worth a thousand questions.
“In the face of the ease of the scam there is a need on the part of all journalists to never assume anything and to always cross-check and verify in order to remain trusted sources of news and information,” Lyon said.
Correction of the Week
An item in the Extra Bases baseball notebook last Sunday misidentified, in some editions, the origin of the name Orcrist the Goblin Cleaver, which Mets pitcher R. A. Dickey gave one of his bats. Orcrist was not, as Dickey had said, the name of the sword used by Bilbo Baggins in the Misty Mountains in “The Hobbit”; Orcrist was the sword used by the dwarf Thorin Oakenshield in the book. (Bilbo Baggins’s sword was called Sting.) -The New York Times
[Update: the headline of this post originally read “Notes on Photo Fraud.” After some objections, we have changed it. —ed.]
I take issue with your grouping of the "reenactment" issue along with these photo manipulation issues, @Craig. The two issues aren't at all comparable.
The "reenactments" have been a standard protocol for decades and it's simply a farce to imply there was a level of dishonesty by the Obama Administration, as your colleague Liz Cox Barrett did, and as a number of headline-mongering news items by reporters who know better have done.
It was always a way to accommodate the photojournalists' needs, and the practice was widely recognized and accepted by photojournalists, until this week when all of a sudden some blogger decided to make it an issue in order to criticize and accuse the Obama Administration of dishonesty. The hue and cry from the White House News Photographers Association is profoundly dishonest, as if they didn't know about the practice until recently. In fact, all White House administrations accommodate the press in a number of ways -- giving special pre-briefings to cable and broadcast reporters, releasing summaries and the text of speeches to reporters before the fact, hosting special briefings on complex issues, to name a few.
So now, in order to accommodate the press once again the practice has been discontinued. Good. In this day and age, who needs a fake reenactment of any televised speech, when we can all see the thing ourselves, whether live or on one of the ubiquitous videos on the internet. In fact, I don't see where they need photographers at the White House at all. So they shot themselves in the foot on this one.
But none of that has anything to do with *manipulation* of photographs.
#1 Posted by James, CJR on Fri 13 May 2011 at 02:32 PM
I think it is pretty outrageous to classify the posing of President Obama for a news photo after the bin Ladin speech as fraud:
"Notes on Photo Fraud
Bin Laden’s death shows the possibilities for manipulation are endless"
My goodness! Fraud? Really?
Was President Reagan also committing fraud? George HW Bush committing fraud? Bill Clinton committing fraud? George W Bush committing fraud?
Or has it been a standard practice no-brainer for decades, until President Obama comes along, and all of a sudden this is fraud?
Or are you accusing the photographers themselves of committing fraud, going back decades?
I respectfully request that you tone down that headline and sub-headline. It is misleading, inflammatory, and untrue.
#2 Posted by Cathleen, CJR on Fri 13 May 2011 at 08:08 PM
@James and @Cathleen. Thanks for your comments. I agree that the reenactments are not fraudulent but are rather a long-held process that outlived its purpose.
My point in grouping it in with the other examples was to show the variety of image-related issues attached to this one event. I also think it illustrates the difficulty in determining the authenticity of photos -- if the explanatory caption wasn't there, you'd never know it was staged to look at it.
As for the headline and subhead, as you can probably guess, I don't write those. But I do apologize if they struck you as misleading.
#3 Posted by Craig Silverman, CJR on Sun 15 May 2011 at 08:33 PM
@Craig:
1) I hold you responsible for your headline because yours is the only name on the piece.
2) Have we come to this, in professional journalism, where it is acceptable for a respectable publication to casually accuse prominent people of criminal behavior and dishonesty in an unsupported inflammatory headline? This kind of thing used to be relegated to the likes of National Enquirer-type journalism, not respectable media organizations, and especially those whose mission is media criticism and holding news organizations to responsible journalism.
What if I wrote a piece with the inflammatory headline Silverman Plagiarizes Romenesko and the point of the piece was that Poynter had run a story about the same topic hours before. (Which it did.)
What if you objected to the headline and I responded with a Gallic shrug: "Sorry, I'm not responsible for the headline!" Would that be satisfactory to you?
I object to this kind of headline-mongering because it makes people cynical and inures us to the rare but serious actual criminal behavior. It makes people throw up their hands and say "They all do it." Well, they don't all do it. And when they do it, people should be outraged, and the perpetrators should be held to account. But when respectable journalists make loose, casual accusations like this, it takes the focus off actual bad behavior, and in effect immunizes that behavior from accountability.
Your colleague Ryan Chittum is constantly decrying the lack of accountability for the perpetrators of the massive mortgage fraud and banking industry collapse. And why haven't these criminals been held to account for their actual fraud? Perhaps because "They all do it!" Even the President of the United States, according to your piece.
#4 Posted by Cathleen, CJR on Mon 16 May 2011 at 07:20 AM
I wrote the headline. I did not mean for the word "fraud" to be taken as an actual legal accusation. I'm changing it now to "Faked Photos."
#5 Posted by Lauren Kirchner, CJR on Mon 16 May 2011 at 12:16 PM
I am most appreciative of the attention you gave to my complaint, and grateful for the change in headline. Thank you.
#6 Posted by Cathleen, CJR on Mon 16 May 2011 at 06:06 PM
Not sure what the "manipulation" of photos by the use of filters has to do with any of this. A filter, properly used, simply adjusts for the inability of a camera to do what the eye does -- make changes in the perception of lighting being the main one. Shooting film in hockey rinks used to routinely produce photos with a yellow cast unless a filter was used -- or, today, a simple color correction in Photoshop that makes the picture look like what the eye saw at the time. So, is a telephoto lens a "manipulation"? It does far more to falsify an image than most filters.
At the start of digital photography, newsrooms came out with some pretty plain and simple guidelines -- you could use technology to make a photo look more like what the person at the scene would have seen. You can't change the reality. Still a pretty good rule, I'd say.
#7 Posted by Mike Peterson, CJR on Wed 18 May 2011 at 07:53 AM