The camera never lies?! Edward Tufte, guru of good presentation, posted an example of image alteration from Nature. It's almost as if Tufte believes that this is the first time such trickery has happened. But the doctoring of photo images is nothing new. My follow-up mentioning much earlier (and more infamous) attempts was deleted by the editors of Tufte's bulletin board. So too were some other follow-ups with more recent examples from Time and Newsweek in which the same base photograph of O J Simpson was used but for one of them considerable editing using PhotoShop had been performed. Another had mentioned the superimposition of Martha Stewart's face in a photo of a fashion model. I wonder why Tufte was surprised at the article Nature published.

The earliest and probably most infamous instances of such tampering was the removal of Trotsky from official photographs after he was deported from the Soviet Union in 1929. These photos (before and after versions) can be seen here. The only difference between the Leninist revisions and the Nature/Time/Newsweek ones is that today it is so much easier and quicker to disprove the axiom that "the camera never lies". One has to admire the skill of the technicians in the late 1920s/early 1930 who excised Trotsky from those images; they didn't have the benefit of PhotoShop.

As image editing software becomes more sophisticated it is highly likely that more attempts to clean up someone's image will occur. One does not even need to go to the expense of buying PhotoShop as the open source work-alike The Gimp is freely available and, for the likes of me who do not use either Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac, can be used on operating systems that PhotoShop does not work on.

To be charitable to Tufte, for a moment, he may be questioning the ethics of the scientists whose image was being described in Nature. But surely all such image editing is unethical especially when the historical record is being tampered with.  ¶ 6:12 pm No comments