News photography

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: When Ronald Reagan visited Bitburg cemetery in 1985, photographers were forced to shoot from vantage points that prevented them from getting both the president and the gravesites of the Nazi Waffen SS who were buried there in a single frame. Were the pictures that came out of that event "true"? They certainly weren't fake, but if you were a photo editor, would you have run them? Inasmuch as photojournalism is meant to impart information, the Bitburg pictures were as misleading as Hajj's clumsily darkened smoke plumes. Imposture can take many forms.