The manipulation of photographs has been an issue as long as there have been photographs. This week, news agency Reuters announced it was deleting all the pictures in its database by a particular Lebanon-based photographer when it was discovered that some of his images had been manipulated with the editing software Photoshop. As Media Guardian reports, the photographer allegedly added smoke to one photo and increased the number of flares being dropped from a plane in another picture. This is a serious issue in news photography, where people have a right to expect that what they see in the picture is what really happened. I once went to a seminar when an expert said it was ethical to change a photo if the image was one that "could have been taken". For example, if you were shooting through a crowd where people were constantly moving in and out of frame, you could remove somebody's head from the foreground of one picture and insert what was behind it from another picture, as long as the resulting image truly represented what was happening. Others take a much harder line, saying you can only publish what you've actually photographed. Where does that leave cropping then? There is an infamous, real photograph of the broadcaster Alan Jones with his head obscuring the letter O on a banner which, I believe, reads "Country". The last two letters of the word either were not in the original frame or had been cropped out subsequently. The resulting photograph associates a four-letter word with Mr Jones's image. Is that acceptable or not?
PS: The BBC's Steve Herrmann and Phil Coomes share their thoughts on the issue of photo manipulation here.