If you remember, we met in Dalian last summer. I came over from the UK with Anna.

Thanks to your advice and influence, I managed to produce two short multimedia pieces when I returned to the UK, so thanks again, and I look forward to seeing more of your work in the future.

Essentially a completely new image, certainly in they eyes of the viewer, has been created in post production. Maybe the rule should revolve around whether the image is editorially true to the original shot.

I wonder though David whether you can really construct an objectively enforceable set of rules?

Tricky but interesting.

Paul – I think ‘manipulation’ has become some part of the ‘art’ (as my various posts over the last year on this topic discuss), but the issue is where the bounds of acceptable versus unacceptable manipulation of still images lie. I don’t, though, follow your reference to multimedia in this context. There are important ethical issues in that domain, but in so far as it employs still imagery at its core, the same questions of how much post-processing is acceptable apply.

On a different note, it looks like digital photography has in many ways freed the aesthetics of photojournalism as a result of of easier post-processing. Most post-processing is of course within the accepted rules, but in my personal opinion it can often look pretty brutal. One of the most common examples is adding strong vignetting, which can for instance be seen in the World Press Photo 1st Prize stories winner (http://bit.ly/awCAxt). Sometimes, when I see these heavily vignetted images, I cannot but help to think whether the vignetting is hiding something in the image. If you hide something by adding vignetting, it is not necessarily all that different from removing something from the frame by other Photoshop methods. (N.B. please do not read this as me accusing Gihan Tubbeh of anything. Just using his photos as an example).

http://jonathan-worth.blogspot.com/2010/01/given-things-away.html

jw

What come out forcefully in reference to these discussions is striking a balance between discussing the photograph as a specific image type, and its relation within a broader community of images.

On first reading Tod Papergeorge’s quotes above, it seems that he rails against the indexicality of the photograph, its ability to testify, to witness (similar to Joel Snyder). However, after reading these again it might be that, rather than adopting such an emphatic view, he too adopts one that acknowledges the photographs inclusion within a wider community of images.

One additional point, however, is that (from the quotes above) the everyday use of the photographic image is not taken into account – which is to reference the photographs relation to the photographed. Holiday snaps are not theorized to such degrees!

Let photography be photography and let’s allow us to use it to communicate what we deem emotionally, culturally, socially and of course even politically important to our history. Ah history now that is a document worth playing with.

As Ed Vulliamy subsequently observed ” I now know the compound in which these terrified men were held captive to have been surrounded on one side by recently reinforced barbed wire, on two sides by a chain-link fence patrolled by menacing armed thugs and on a fourth side by a wall. But so what? This was a camp — I would say a concentration camp — and they were its inmates.”

And as Dr Merdzanic said giving evidence to the Milomir Stakic trial in reply to the question “What prevented people from leaving Trnopolje the camp? You said men were no longer allowed to leave unless their name was on a list.”,”Guards were posted around Trnopolje, all around Trnopolje. There were guard posts, and then there was this fence. One could easily jump over that fence, however. But apart from the checkpoints and the guards, even if only a simple line had been drawn on the ground, nobody would dare cross that line.”

Watching both the Judgment and the ITN footages, looking beyond the ITN crew along the line of the fence and observing the way prisoners are lined up along it, the impression is not one of refugees walking around as they choose or that of a crowd clustered around the point at which something interesting is happening. These are people lined up along a fence that contains them.

To allow black and white digital is, as you point out, to allow a complete manipulation of the image. But photography is essentially an art of manipulation.

The bizarre thing is that these people actually start from the point that photography is in itself a true representation of an event.

How daft is that?

If you really want to break judging down then you are examining every decision that a photographer makes. From where they stand, the time of day, the angle, the lens, the speed, the composition, the importance of the event, (all manipulations) right through to how the photographer manipulates the image when they get it on a computer. And the final question is what effect does this manipulation have on me?

They should reject over photo shopped images on no other basis than that they look crap; that they detract from what is on view because they no longer ‘feel’ accurate. To ask for the RAW file is to in some way suggest there is an objective process going on. Bollocks.

Do you like the photo or not?

Lets talk about the truth.

Please invite me to speak to your students about my war experiences, free speech, British libel laws, etc. I am sure I can do it better than you. I am not being malicious, I mean it as a friend. I have lived it and learned lessons from it.

I survived one of those camps called Omarska, mainly because of the story reported. Now then, how can anyone in their right mind put an issue of a particular ‘image’ before the lives of the very people behind that ‘image’? Don’t my fellow humans beings want to know who those people were, and why they were in there, who brought them in there, and what happened in there? Aren’t those lives more worthy than the ‘image’ itself, and what it may or may not ‘represent’. Isn’t that the real issue? We are talking about human beings, family people, innocent civilians. There were no court trials in Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje. There were brutal, cold blooded, summary executions. And I have known most of those executioners personally for most of my life. We once shared school desks. Why don’t people want to know about that? Where does the issue of freedom of speech fits in here? We are talking about murder. We are condoning murder. What’s wrong with us?

By (ab)using the smokescreen of the freedom of speech all those denialists turn my guts upside down every single time. Why? Because I am just human. When will they realise that their callousness easily matches the one displayed by my torturers. They dehumanise me all over again.

Kemal

Yes, I’m very much aware of that claim — that ‘the court accepted the journalists were surrounded by wire, not the prisoners…’ Its a false claim, and here is why.

The libel trial against Living Marxism for running the erroneous Thomas Deichmann story on Trnopolje was a jury trial. This means all determinations of fact, and the final judgment, was reached by the unanimous decision of twelve citizens, after they had heard all the arguments, listened to the cross-examination of all parties, and seen all the evidence, including all the video. So the jury verdict is the only basis on which to make a statement about what that ‘the Court’ did or did not accept.

Nonetheless, the claim that the Court offered a view on the wire fence different from the jury verdict comes from a reading of a comment by the presiding judge, Mr Justice Morland, during the proceedings. Many people who want to continue to discredit the story of Fikret Alic and revise our understanding of Trnopolje call attention to the judge’s comment. Most people wanting to make this case have relied on a BBC news story about the libel trial that contained a paraphrase of the judge’s opinion — but this BBC story was subsequently found to be misleading and unfair by the Broadcasting Standards Commission. As for the Guardian article you quote, I read that as first summarising the Deichmann/LM allegation before reporting the jury verdict, but if you wanted to read it as endorsing the judge’s comment about the fence, then it is as mistaken and misleading as the BBC report the BSC ruled against.

My 2002 articles (see links above) put everything in context and provide the detailed evidence. If you read part 1, pp. 20-21, you will see the judge’s comments quoted and discussed, and in part 1, p. 7, you will see the details of the inaccurate BBC story. The judge offered his personal view, questioning part of ITN’s account about the condition and location of the fences at Trnopolje. In the end, this was a minor and contested point that did not have any impact on the jury’s deliberation, its understanding of the camp conditions, and their unanimous decision. As a result, this false claim cannot be used to call the veracity of the Alic image and the full ITN report on Trnopolje into question. A full reading of my two articles demonstrates why that is a secure conclusion.

[5th and 6th paragraphs extracted]
The LM article, headlined The picture that fooled the world, accused ITN of deliberately misrepresenting an image that came to symbolise the horror of the Bosnian war. It showed an emaciated Muslim, Fikret Alic, apparently caged behind barbed wire at Trnopolje camp. In fact, the wire had surrounded the ITN reporters.

Nevertheless, the jury accepted that the camp was – contrary to what LM had suggested – a prison, and therefore the ITN pictures had not misrepresented the truth.

Bosniaks from Kozarac were rounded and up and brought to Trnopolje. Some were separated and taken to Omarska and Keraterm. Prisoners from Omarska and Keraterm – where starvation was part of the inhumane conditions that caused many prisoners to lose 20 to 30 kg of body weight, some more – were brought to Trnopolje where some were killed and others shipped across the front lines in prisoner exchanges and for purposes of population transfer (hence references to the “transit centre” – as if this was a benign activity) .

Trnopolje may have been, as Maggie O’Kane apparently wrote, “the best camp to be sent to”, but that designation should simply have alerted any conscientious investigator to consider what the places other people might be sent to were like. Knightley, Herman, Peterson, Chomsky et al. have no interest in opening up the analysis to see Trnopolje in its context, either as part of the Prijedor system or even simply as the less important of the two camps covered in the ITN footage. Herman and Peterson in their open letter even take Vulliamy to task for referring to camps in the plural rather than the one camp they want to concentrate on.

Trnopolje was, like Omarksa, scene of the Petrovdan massacre to which Daniel Toljoaga refers, and Keraterm, whose starvation regime left Fikret Alic in the emaciated condition seen in the photograph, part of a network of systematic atrocity which was similar in function and severity to the Nazi-era concentration camps, as you have carefully established. When intelligent academics with an apparently extensive knowledge of source materials maintain that it wasn’t and pass over the existence and methods of operation of the rest of the system, one wonders why? Cui bono?

Vulliamy also observed that “The bench in The Hague issued its judgment on Trnopolje in 1997: a verdict that described the camp as infinitely worse than anything we reported – an infernal place of rape, murder and torture. Witness after witness confirmed this.”

He was correct. In the Kvocka Trial Chamber Judgement, for example, “One witness testified that ‘during the night, terrible screams could be heard, moans, beatings, from practically all the rooms which served as the Omarska concentration camp’”.

The Kvocka Trial Judgment confirmed that the Keraterm and Trnopolje camps functioned according to the model established by the concurrently operating Omarska camp. The pervasive brutality that took place in this concentration camp can only be explained in terms of hell on earth. The judgement confirms that people were burned alive in this camp:

“Petrovdan, or St. Peter’s Day, is an orthodox religious festival that occurs on the 12th of July each year. It is customary to build bonfires on the eve of the holiday in celebration. In 1992, this tradition took on a terrifying aspect in Omarska. A huge fire was made in front of the white house from dump truck tyres. Former detainee Hase Icic described the events that followed:

‘At the time, the Serbs, on the eve of Petrovdan, had a real, all-out sort of manifestation rally of civilians and guards. … As night began to fall, they started to take the people out of the first rooms…
Q. What did you hear after some detainees were taken out?
A. I remember that, and I’ll remember it for the rest of my life, the cries of women who were outside or in the first room. I’ll never forget their cries and screams. Then I smelt the stench of burning meat. You know when meat begins to burn, it has a specific smell, and this smell of burning flesh was mixed with the smell of the burning rubber from the tyres.’

This witness heard from other detainees that their fellow inmates had been thrown onto the
fire. This terrible incident was corroborated by Witness AM, who watched the massacre from a window. Ermin Strikovic was able to see people walking round a big fire from the small window in his detention room. He heard screams of pain, although he was not able to see the cause. Zuhra Hrnic testified that the following morning, on her way to the cafeteria, she saw a large ‘FAP’ lorry fully loaded with dead bodies parked in the Omarska camp.”

Daniel Toljaga
The Congress of North American Bosniaks
Board of Directors (www.bosniak.org)