Image Ethics?

A break from non sequiturs!

From Errol Morris' NYTimes blog:

"There’s a famous photograph taken by an FSA [Farm Service Administration] photographer, Arthur Rothstein, of a cow’s skull. He was accused of moving the cow skull in order to make more effective propaganda for the Roosevelt administration. These issues have been with us, probably, since the beginning of photography. They weren’t invented in the Lebanon war. I thought that you hit on it: Are we saying that there’s no damage done to these apartment buildings? That no children were killed? Even in the clearly Photoshopped image of the smoke over Beirut? Are we saying that Beirut was never hit by a bomb? That there were no apartment buildings leveled by Israeli drones? Is the crime posing? Or is the crime creating an image — even if it was produced ethically — that leads the viewer to a controversial conclusion. A photographer makes the decision to take a picture with a Mickey Mouse toy in the foreground. Is that a crime? Is it a crime if he found the toy and didn’t place it? Is it unacceptable because it suggests that children were killed?"

"There is a selection process. And where there’s war, there’s controversy. "

(read and reap, there's also a part II)

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/it-was-all-started-by-a-mouse-part-1/