ArticlesThere are a couple of closely-related ethical issues that have been taunting me as I struggle to decide where I, personally, draw the line. While they are about relatively trivial items, I think they reflect on bigger issues.
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How far is too far when fixing up a blog comment?
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How far is too far when touching up a photograph?
Blog Comment Copy Editing
It’s one issue whether you should edit blog articles of your own, after they have been published. It’s another issue about whether you should edit the comments of people kind enough to contribute their own thoughts.
The default position has to be “Don’t touch!” If I thought that my words would be twisted or modified after I posted a comment to a blog, I would be very hesitant to post any comments at all.
However, if someone makes a typo in a URL and posts a broken link – isn’t it reasonable for the moderator to simply correct the typo, to match the contributors original intention? After all, they can’t edit it themselves.
If that is okay, what about a misspelled word? Should the moderator feel comfortable about correcting it?
If that is okay, what about missing parenthesis? Is it okay to put them back in?
What if the user didn’t realise the <blockquote> tag was available, and used > symbols instead. Is it okay to update the HTML to improve the appearance and make it easier to understand what is quoted?
How far can we go here? Is it okay to reword a sentence so it doesn’t start with “And”? Is it okay to prevent the sentence from ending in a preposition?
What if someone is simply wrong or boneheaded? Can the comment be simply be deleted? Is it okay to correct the sentence to represent what they would have written if they were intelligent and informed person and had given it some thought?
There’s clearly a spectrum here. At one end, it seems innocent enough. At the other end, it is completely unacceptable. Working out where the line is, is tricky.
(For the record: On this blog, I have stretched as far as the blockquote example – and I felt a tinsy bit uncomfortable about doing it. I certainly haven’t deleted any comments that I disagree with – although I have been tempted to delete one or two boneheaded ones. If you think that policy is inappropriate, please comment. I promise not to edit it to make it sound like you agree with me!)
Touching up a photo
I do a moderate amount of photography as a hobby, and I post many of my photographs to a web-based photograph database. A couple of minute’s effort on processing each photograph can improve the quality immensely. The same dilemma arises.
Suppose you are editing a nice photo of a friend at a party.
Fixing the brightness and contrast of a photo is only fair – they are just artifacts of the camera’s inability to capture light in the same way as the human eye.
Cropping the photo seems fair, too – the ratio of the height to length of a photo is an historical oddity of the 35mm format. So, adjusting the image to include only the subject that you are interested in is quite okay – and if that means that the table of empty beer-bottles in the foreground of the shot happens to get left out, so much the better.
No-one would object to removing red-eye, right? Sure, it is a bit more processing, but we are only removing another artifact of the camera.
While we are touching things up, there is a reflection of the flash off of a piece of shiny metal in the background. It is distracting. Let’s just get rid of that.
Another empty beer-bottle on a shelf in the background? It just distracts from the composition. It can go. So can the guy in the background, who managed to stumble into shot by mistake and is gazing at a point off to the right. It draws attention away from the subject. He can go too.
It’s a shame that your friend had a stray eyelash on their cheek. That’s not what they normally look like, so why should they be preserved for posterity like that? Let’s just touch that up. It really wasn’t a good skin day was it? Do we really want skin-blemishes to ruin an otherwise perfect photo? Let’s just heal that over.
Now that you mention it, a poorly-aimed flash really can be make wrinkles look bad. Is softening a few crows’-feet really going to hurt? Let’s do that.
At what point do you stop? Is this your friend at a party, or a mythical fantasy creature that you are creating?
Frank Hurley
Frank Hurley: The Man Who Made History is a documentary about Captain James Francis “Frank” Hurley OBE, an Australian photographer who always impressed me greatly – not just for his photography, but for his real-life adventures. The documentary focussed less on Hurley’s photographs or his remarkable (and disaster-struck) trip to the Antarctic with Shackleton (where they spent the winter huddled under an upturned longboat) and more upon the controversy the Hurley caused when he strayed too far in the darkroom.
To get the perfect photograph, he would composite several shots together. Using shots from the Antarctic, he would add an element of drama to a dull scene, by placing an image of a penguin against a shot of the wild-clouds. Using shots from his multiple stints as a war photographer, he would juxtapose an image of a bi-plane, with a plume of smoke from another scene and a reaction shot of a soldier from another battle – no single, unedited, photograph could convey the scene as strongly as these faked shots.
Journalists, historians and the documentary-producers attacked the practice. Hurley defended it. After watching the documentary, I remained unconvinced, but was tending clearly towards Hurley’s side, even if I don’t think that I would have gone so far as him.
I do not want to sound like an apologist for Hurley. Some of his behaviour, including his treatment of the natives of Papua and the Torres Strait, and his abandonment of his family during his adventures seems – at least to 21st Century eyes – to be disappointing.
Greg Apodaca
Of course, there is a big difference in expectations between commercial photography and photo-journalism. I realise that the photographs that we see in advertisements and billboards have been strongly re-touched. Not just the ones that are clearly tricks to attract your attention – flames coming out of the mouths of models advertising chilli-products, and the like – but regular images that apparently portray reality. I know that these advertisers are willing to go far further than my sensibilities (or even Hurley’s!) would take me.
However, I hadn’t really fathomed how far, until I came across the web-site of Greg Apodaca. Apodaca is an accomplished commercial photographer and re-toucher. He has a page with his re-touching portfolio, presumable to encourage other people to hire him. He includes before and after images, so you can see what he has achieved.
I encourage you to have a look. I don’t include any photos of his here, in line with his requests – even though the fair-use provision in copyright law would probably allow it. (There go those ethical dilemmas again.)
I don’t know what surprised me more – the incredible lengths that have been taken to re-touch the faces of his models – to the point of being barely recognisable as the same person – or the fact that similar lengths that have been taken to touch-up photos of inanimate objects – the images of the leather shoe and the palm computer particular stick in my mind.
It certainly opened my eyes – almost as much as his re-touching opened the eyes of his models!
Apodaca warns that some of his images show:
an extreme example of how far an image can be taken.
I wonder if he hasn’t sometimes stepped out of his own comfort zone for re-touching. He writes:
It doesn’t seem natural to me to take out every curve, to airbrush out every blemish, but what the Art Director wants, the Art Director will get.
Conclusion
Perhaps I am worrying myself too much about the little issues, especially when far greater photographers (and bloggers) than I seem to be quite proud of their own work when they go far further than I do.
However, I wonder whether ethics have a fractal-nature. Isn’t it just as important to be ethical about the minor issues as the major ones? I’ll have to continue to work out where the line is that I am not willing to cross.
Comment by Aristotle Pagaltzis on September 8, 2005
Fixing comments is fine in my book up to the point where you start altering the commenter’s voice. Fixing a typo (or maybe two) does not do that, nor correcting links or fixing their markup usage. Rewording sentences is, at the best of times, pushing the limits.
OTOH, I think deleting comments outright is fine — it’s certainly less invasive than editing them. The most correct course of action would be, IMO, to replace the comment with some remark à la “[This comment has been deleted because of reason]”
Similar reasoning applies to photos. Correcting the contrast and lighting is fine. So too is removing artefacts. But outright removal of things from the photo goes too far, I think. OTOH, I think it’s fine if you simply selectively darken, blur, or otherwise distract from distracting parts of the photo.
Ethos as regards photos cannot be to leave the picture completely untouched; the photo itself is inherently an imperfect representation of the moment it is supposed to capture. So ask yourself what purpose the photo serves; any manipulations that do not tread on that line, then, must be acceptable.
Comment by Casey on September 9, 2005
Editing of any kind is indeed a slippery slope.
I believe strongly that there’s a need for better distributed content management on the web. (I’ve ranted about it here and here) A combination between the Way of the Wiki, where anything can be changed by anyone but changes are tracked, and the Way of the Blog, where identity and reputation are very important.
If (as per my pipe dream proposals) I maintained copies of my comments outside of your control, it is easier then for editing to be sanctioned. You control appearance on your page (including, for instance, deleting the comment entirely) and I control the words I created.
PS. You have an dangling parenthesis at the end of your third paragraph about Greg Apodaca. Will you leave it there?
PPS. As an aside, any writing or photography or anything else involves “editing” – the framing of the shot, the things you don’t say, and so on. I think that there is a big difference between your creativity in your own work (however that manifests itself) and changing someone else’s.
Comment by Jeff Atwood on September 9, 2005
Wow, those before and after mouseover photos are amazing!
It’s also important not to be obsessive-compulsive, too 😉
Comment by Julian on September 10, 2005
Aristotle:
A very thoughtful comment, thank you. I did ponder on your ideas for a bit.
I do like your phrase “altering the commenter’s voice.” I think that is a good way of explaining the existence of the line that shouldn’t be crossed. It still leaves, however, the same dilemma: Would this particular edit change the commenter’s voice?
Let me give another example that came up yesterday:
I am reviewing the comments that came back from an on-line questionnaire given to many users of a product. One person submitted a comment “TO EXPENSIVE”.
Based on the country the response came from, the user is almost certainly not a native English speaker. I don’t think the user would object if I corrected the text to “TOO EXPENSIVE” when I present the results of the questionnaire to my management. However, would they object if I changed it to “Too expensive”, to fit in with the capitalisation of the rest of my report? Did they use all-caps because they were trying to exclaim the point, or because they were a beginner typist, and didn’t see the point in wasting time on the Shift key? Would it make a difference if it had been 100 words in all-caps, rather than two?
The details of this example aren’t important. (Okay, maybe they are for the other obsessives 🙂 – I plan to leave the capitalisation as is, but correct the spelling.)
The picture I am forming in my mind is that we are on a slope. At the top is a self-defeating abandonment of copy-editing and moderation. At the bottom is the moral low ground – censorship and “bearing false witness”. Somewhere, halfway up the slope is the people like me, with theodolites and hand-drawn maps, obsessively trying to position ourselves correctly!
To force the analogy too far, blog comments and photo-editing represent strong winds, rustling the maps in our hands, and constantly fighting to push us down the hill.
Immediately after wondering if you haven’t left the definition of the line too open, I wonder here if you haven’t left the definition too narrow.
The distinction between darkening and blurring an unattractive beer-bottle (from my example above) and deleting it entirely seems to be dark and blurred to me.
Does Apodaca’s rotation of a Palm computer, to line up better in its case, over-step your mark here, or not?
Does this work as a guidestick? I thought it sounded pretty good…
For example, let’s apply it to the survey comment: If the purpose of the author using all-caps was to emphasize that the product is too expensive, then both the mappings “TOO EXPENSIVE” or “Too expensive!” should be acceptable. If the author had written 100 words in all-caps, the intention of the author would seem to be saving on the shift key, so copy-editing it to lower-case would be fine. This guidestick seems to be helpful!
Now, let’s apply it to Hurley: Hurley’s purpose was to convey the drama he felt while on the battle-fields. Merging several images to achieve that goal would appear to be fine. However, the historians have a different goal – for an accurate factual (not emotional) representation of what happened on the day. For them, this manipulation it appears unacceptable. Well, this guidestick explains the controversy, but not the resolution.
Similarly, let’s considered the re-touching of a shoe. For the re-toucher the purpose was to make the advertisement eye-catching and the product look good. There are few manipulations that would be out-of-bounds here. As a consumer, however, I want the image to give me an accurate representation of the quality of the shoe and how it will look on my feet. The manipulation is unacceptable to me.
I won’t even touch the issues of whether the self-esteem of individuals is negatively impacted by the air-brushed representations of models in the media.
I tried to apply the guidestick to the photograph of my party-going friend, but I haven’t really been able to work out what the purpose is here.
Thanks again, Aristotle, for raising some very interesting ideas. I think I position myself only slightly further down the slope than you, but I fear I am slipping further, which is what provoked much of this thought in the first place.
Comment by Julian on September 10, 2005
Casey,
I read your ‘rants’ when you originally posted them, but I am still only beginning to realise just how right you are. See also the updated version of the Editing Own Comments article.
The answer is No. I corrected it (and a capitalisation error I also noticed), However, I didn’t correct the missing full-stop in your “I’ve ranted about it here and here” comment! That line on the hill that I will not cross is curvy and difficult to make out clearly!
“Don’t alter the creativity of others.” and “Don’t alter the voice of others.” seem to be just different ways (voices?) of describing the same thing. I agree. (Aside: By paraphrasing Casey’s and Aristotle’s positions here, did I change their voice too much?)
However, it is difficult to apply this to photographs – what does it mean to not change the creativity of a photograph of a shoe or a friend – especially if you are the original photographer?
Comment by Julian on May 29, 2006
Via Coding Horror comes an argument that 35mm film size is based on the Golden Ratio after all – but indirectly, via the Golden Rectangle.
Comment by Julian on October 26, 2006
Via Chris at BrainSnorkel comes a link to the (astroturfing) Campaign for Real Beauty and their advert complaining how far the touching up of photos can go.
You can choose for yourself whether you share their apparent outrage, and whether you express that outrage via consumerism (i.e. by purchasing their competing products).
I just thought it was an interesting illustration of what’s possible.
[I also think they made her eyes a bit too large.]
Comment by Alastair on October 30, 2006
Over on codinghorror, I just had a comment of mine edited. In parentheses I asked if Jeff could find a better term than the word “retard”, used in the post. I went back there to read the followups and was surprised to find my comment edited. “retard” was replaced with the (admittedly far improved) “naive” and my parenthetical comment removed. The post was also updated.
I’m not sure of the ethics here but if it was my blog I would have owned up to using an inappropriate term, and apologised.
Comment by Julian on October 31, 2006
Alastair,
I found myself giggling at this. Why? Because Jeff Atwood at CodingHorror once picked me up on a similar inappropriate choice of words. My solution? Apologise and edit the offending text.
Where comments have been created merely to highlight simple typos and similar errors, I have corrected text and deleted the comment. Where the error has been significant, I normally let the comment stand and indicate that the update has been made. Maybe Atwood considered this no more than the former case?
In related news, I am working on a new blog post about CAPTCHA triggered by the very same CodingHorror article you commented on – I just need to check one or two things before I post it.
Comment by Julian on July 10, 2007
Reuter’s Policy on Photoshop (which presumably applies to all digital image editing tools, not just Photoshop)