I attended the “Fighting Misinformation and Protecting Image Creators and Consumers Through Attribution and Provenance” Photoville webinar. The online event took place on October 14th and featured Santiago Lyon as the speaker.
We had discussed ethics a bit in class and how certain photo edits may be considered unethical. This was the subject of the webinar, and Lyon spoke about a program that can be used to detect and create a history of what edits were made to a particular photo. This allows people to trust the photo and the content knowing that it was not edited in a way that could spread misinformation. Other things like the location of the image and the original photographer’s name could be attached to the photo so that viewers would know who took it and where.
Lyon also showcased some of his works and told stories about his life as a journalist. He showed images he took in Lisbon, El Salvador, and Afghanistan. I found it interesting that he was served as the Chair of the Jury for the World Press Photo Contest in 2013. We discussed the controversy around the winning photo of that year in class.
I knew that photo editing was a part of photography, but I never realized how photo editing could ethically compromise an image. When I thought of photo editing, I always just thought of changing the lighting slightly and making the image look its best. I never knew that some professionally taken photos may have been edited to portray a different story or “impossible conditions.” I think about the phrase “I’ll believe it when I see it”, and how sometimes you cannot believe what you see in images sometimes.
I hope that the Content Authenticity Initiative is successful in fighting misinformation because photography is an integral part of how people receive information today.
