(( I’m only saying this cause people are so quick to judge middle eastern countrys and islam only because what the media is showing them and it sickens me there is good and bad everywhere you go! not just pakistan, not yemen, or anywhere else I leave in the USA and who are we to judge other countrys here with have homeless drug addicts eating peoples faces off, gun man shooting in a crowded cinema, and most recently a man who went into a school and shot innocent children))
as an example
instead, we should judge a news photograph as a collection of purported facts about the world that is accurate if its claims are true and inaccurate if they’re not. But photographers make editorial decisions all the time: where to point the camera, of course, but also how to frame the shot, whether to crop and if so what, how long a shutter speed to use; and all of these can affect the facts a picture presents, without falsifying the image. And anyway, which facts are relevant? Last week the Times ran an impressive graphic showing before and after satellite photographs of a bombed Beirut neighborhood, but the “before” picture was in blooming color and the ‘after’ picture was in black and white. Many people would say that the black-and-white shot was more “realistic” because monochrome seems to offer a kind of sobriety. But of course color is closer to the facts, and even color is unreliable.
To make matters more complicated, news photographs are made by more hands than the photographer’s. Editors at home will sometimes crop a picture, or clean it up, and they’ll often flesh out captions, which can radically change what we think we’re looking at. Hajj’s photo of the Israeli F-16 bore a caption that said the jet was dropping missiles; in fact they were flares, but who could know that just by looking? What you see when you contemplate a news photo is what you’re told to see. And sometimes it’s what you’re allowed to see