Story of the year! Now if only we could find a good cover photo….
Interesting discussion going on over at Photo District News about Time Magazine’s recent Iran cover.
Yes, the editors did put a disclaimer stating the image was digitally altered, and the PDN people are trying to figure out how (best guess is they turned a horizontal into a vertical by adding sky etc). But I think that’s missing the much bigger issue, which is: when choosing the cover image for the biggest international news story of the year, why was it necessary to create a composite or digitally altered image when there was so much incredible photojournalism (professional or citizen) coming out of Tehran last week?
Time Magazine has always prided itself on being a beacon of photojournalism, and I think this sets a very bad precedent for the future of the craft: why risk going into a conflict area to shoot news when editors are just going to grab a few images and create something that fits their preconceived idea of what a dynamic cover is? When the editors were pouring over the thousands of powerful images coming in from the wires, did they really not find a single one that would have made a good cover?
This is incredibly disappointing, and I would really love to hear what Time’s photo editor can say to defend this, and I’m surprised there hasn’t been more of an uproar in the photojournalism community online (though perhaps the outrage is out there and I’m just not browsing the right sites).
Perhaps this is what happens when your director of photography of 19-years retires, then her replacement leaves the magazine to pursue a career in freelance editing, then her replacement leaves to work for the White House photo team. All in the span of about two years.
Also, there is an interesting connect here with all the talk about this being the first “Twitter revolution”. I’m not a big Twitter fan, but obviously this technology played a very large and largely positive role in getting news out of Tehran last week. Wouldn’t it have been great to see Time use the same concept of open-source community or citizen journalism to use an image from Facebook or Flickr? It would have shown great use of new technology. Instead, I think they stooped to using the lowest, most puerile form of modern technology: creating something that isn’t there.
Again, I just can’t understand the thinking behind their decision….
