Tonista

“This was one of the things that was in my head when I was writing the “in defense of captions” post — while that’s useful or could be useful, a technical solution alone is never going to solve the problem of accuracy in the media. You could take a photographer’s image straight from the camera, not even processed with Photoshop, put it on the wire, and it’s the caption that provides the accuracy for that picture. The caption is the place where it’s easy to mislead the reader. [I have written about this in my essay “Photography as a Weapon.”] The caption is the thing that provides accurate context. And without an accurate context or with a misleading context, you can completely distort the meaning of an image. At the end of the day it comes back to old-fashioned ethics. You have to trust your people on the ground and you have to drill into them the ethical standards that your organization has.”