Comment by re | Hacker News Reader

Comment by re | Hacker News Reader

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> journalistic poison ... intentionally composed to compress the crowds

The article addresses and explores this viewpoint and attempts to add nuance.

> If you search for "compression effect corona" in Japanese on the internet, you'll discover a flood of criticism of newspaper and television images related to the pandemic, including allegations of "creating crowding," "lies," and "faked shots." [...]

> The photos were lambasted as "exaggerating" the crowding, "manipulative," and "stoking public anxiety." However, there is no proof that the photographer was deliberately seeking to create a distorted impression of the scene.

> Shooting crowds with a telephoto lens is standard procedure among photojournalists. I had never questioned the practice, because I thought it was intended to express crowdedness. And as far as I am aware, there had never been criticism of the technique before the pandemic. [...]

> I don't think us news photographers can keep using techniques we'd always taken for granted without talking about why we use them. We are in a time when we must try to shoot our subjects from multiple angles, and explain the effects lens compression and exaggerated perspective can have.

Using telephoto lenses and angles that preclude the audience from understanding distances between people in a crowd without knowing the specifications of photography equipment is absolutely fine for artistic effect, but in documentary shots IMO it treads the line next to bad (regardless of the times) journalism, especially if another composition that allows the viewer to approximate crowd density objectively is possible.

To clarify, the blame does not lie entirely with the photojournalist. They may choose to get a shot using a telephoto lens to capture, say, which face expressions dominate the crowd (which may be unfeasible with a wide lens).

Now, if this is the only picture the photographer has taken, then both the editor (who had not had a lot of options, though still could go without a photo entirely) and the photographer are guilty of contributing unprofessional journalism.

On the other hand, if the editor chose to use only the tele shot while having other angles available, then the editor is culpable (the photographer, only in so much as they do not raise a concern and choose to continue to work with that editor).

> However, there is no proof that the photographer was deliberately seeking to create a distorted impression of the scene.

How could there be? Do you expect the photographer to outright admit that intent? Short of such an admission, what would proof of the photographers' intent look like?

I suspect it's unfair to blame the photographers on the ground directly for this. Often photographers will take a number of shots from different angles and at different focal lengths and at different moments. At least in some publications after that they will have then had only very limited input into which images got used (or whether their images or someone else's were used).

In these cases it is/was an editorial decision. If editorial staff had multiple images to choose from like this then it's hard to see a decision to use the most crowded-looking photos (which it's pretty hard to argue isn't what happened) as a completely innocent one.

Yes, if the subject of the story is "overcrowding at popular park despite coronavirus" it is intensely dishonest to exclusively use shots taken with long lenses.

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