SALLY YOUNG AND FAY ANDERSON
ALL OF THE newspaper photographers interviewed for this book remember their first camera. Even the more reserved recalled with vivid clarity and excitement the moment when a usually gruff pic editor handed them ‘their’ camera. During the retelling, they smiled and described in meticulous detail what the camera was, how it looked and even how it felt. The camera represented both a personal and professional watershed. ‘I never dared to dream I would be a photographer,’ the Age’s Jason South says. Former Fairfax photographer and picture editor Mike Bowers recalls his sense of achievement: ‘Wow, you know, I’ve made it because I’m getting my gear bought for me … This is it.’
When Lloyd Brown began as a cadet in the late 1930s at the Herald in Melbourne, he was given a very bulky Graflex camera. Because the photographer looked down at a mirror in the camera, using a Graflex meant they had to follow the action of live sports in reverse.1 But even when newer cameras came in, Brown continued to use the unwieldy Graflex for the football because he liked how long lenses could be put on them easily, and he believed that looking through the viewfinder was better for football. Other photographers thought differently, but Brown believes that when you were looking down, ‘it was harder to see what was around you but you were more likely to get it sharp’.
There is a photograph of Brown on the royal tour of 1954 that shows him with his head looking down through the camera while the other photographers are looking up. Brown was using a telephoto lens on his Graflex camera, whereas the others had newer Speed Graphic cameras. The Speed Graphic was the dominant portable professional camera from the 1930s through to the end of the 1950s.2 It became synonymous with press photography in popular culture, including through Superman comics and television shows. Clive Mackinnon recalls being given a Speed Graphic for the royal tour. It was an improvement on the Graflex in many ways, but it was still heavy and complicated to use. Its sheets of film had to be changed after each exposure.3 The crack of the intense flashes used on these older cameras is familiar to anyone who has seen newsreel footage of press photographers of the day.
Keith Barlow, who worked for the Daily Telegraph and Women’s Weekly, remembers being given a Speed Graphic for one of his first big assignments in the early 1950s, photographing the Lord Mayor of Sydney. It had a double dark slide, which took a sheet of film on either side, and two flash bulbs. You could only take two photographs. When Barlow got the Lord Mayor in front of the camera, he loaded up but nothing happened. He’d exposed the film without the flash, and it was a throw-away: ‘Thank goodness, the second photograph worked.’ John Lamb, a 50-year veteran, was not so lucky: ‘Menzies taught me … I was using Speed Graphics then … And I asked him to do something and he did it. I said, “Oh, I wasn’t ready,” ’cause, you know, these things [are] pretty clumsy. And he patted me on the head and walked off. He said, “You[’ve] always got to be ready …”.’ Dennis Lingane, who worked in Western Australia, also recalls the pressure associated with training using 5 × 4" Speed Graphics. He was issued with a double dark slide, and was only allowed to use the second film if the person he was photographing blinked. Otherwise, he would get in trouble for wasting film: ‘That was how we were trained.’ Wasting film was especially frowned upon in Frank Packer’s frugal newsrooms.4 Photographers recalled their considerable anxiety, but also the humour that sometimes ensued when they missed the picture due to their inexperience or unreliable equipment.
Those older cameras meant photographers had to be conservative and try to anticipate when the action was about to take place in order to get the picture. Because things often went wrong, they also had to know how to fix their own cameras. Barry Baker spent a year working in the camera technician’s department learning how to pull apart a Speed Graphic and put it back together before he went out taking photographs.5 But, just as Brown had wanted to hold onto his Graflex when new technology came in, older photographers continued to prefer the cameras they were familiar with. Guy Magowan was one of the last cadets to be given a Speed Graphic camera in the late 1960s because his boss, the legendary Doug Burton, head photographer for WA Newspapers, insisted Magowan learn how to use it for the horse races. After about two years, Magowan started using a 35mm camera. Burton found out and was not happy.6
In 1959, Nikon released its first single-lens reflex camera, which took 36-exposure roll film.7 Terry Phelan recalls how, before roll film, photographers had to load cut film in the dark, individually loading either six or twelve pieces of sheet film into little steel holders that went in the back of the camera. Once roll film came in, the photographers could take more shots, freeing them from the pressure of having to cover a whole football match with only six or twelve shots. With ‘a roll of film in your pocket’, Phelan says, ‘You couldn’t go mad, but you always had enough.’ Some of the older photographers, accustomed to the pressure that went along with limited-shot cameras, worried that roll film caused a lack of discipline.
The 1960s saw significant change in cameras. Bill McAuley arrived at the Daily Telegraph at a time when two-and-a-quarter cameras like the Rolleiflex were being phased out. It was ‘a new era’, and the Telegraph was the first newspaper in Australia to go exclusively 35mm. The new equipment was ‘sexy’ and very ‘quick’.8 The SMH changed over to 35mm Nikons in 1965.9 Mervyn Bishop, a former SMH photographer, remembered that shift from using Speed Graphics to 35mm as a dramatic change. Photographers no longer really needed tripods, except for night shots. They now had direct vision through the lens, instead of via a mirror through the lens. Neville Waller notes that the 35mm cameras allowed more women to enter the profession because the previous cameras had been so heavy; the lighter camera ‘made it a lot more open’. But photographers still had to carry heavy equipment, and even today, with lighter digital cameras, they still have to lug laptops and long lenses, often resulting in physical injuries and chronic pain in their necks, shoulders and backs.
Pre-digital photographers developed their photographs in the darkroom, a site that remains the vital and fertile place in many photographers’ imagination and collective memory. It was the photographers’ exclusive domain, and journalists were not welcome unless they were invited. ‘It was almost a mysterious place,’ Susan Windmiller, who was a cadet at the SMH and then worked for Leader newspapers, explains. ‘When the journalists came in, they’d hit the walls because they’d be blinded by the darkroom.’10 Fairfax picture editor Leigh Henningham describes it as ‘special’. He says, ‘it was like our secret world and … if any reporter or editor or anyone came in … they were always very nervous because it was dark; they were scared they were going to trip over everything or … fall into a tank full of deadly chemicals.’ Angela Wylie adds, ‘it was a photographers’ place’.
It is the darkroom that continues to conjure vivid and ambivalent recollections about physical space and smell. The walls were stained by nicotine residue; everyone had ‘fags’ hanging from their mouths, and small fires in rubbish bins caused by scattered butts were casually put out. The putrid smell of the chemicals, the noise and feel of the presses, and memories of lost colleagues evoke a mixture of sorrow and joy. Many photographers describe the darkroom as a place of alchemy; the word ‘magic’ is constantly mentioned. For the copy boys and cadet photographers, it was their first encounter with commercial photography. Brown remembers how the two-minute trip to the darkroom became half an hour because he stood there fascinated, watching them process the prints. ‘The picture would suddenly emerge and how clever they were to do this,’ Brown remembers. ‘How they used their hands to shade the pictures where they needed more exposure. After twelve months or more, I started hounding Arthur Willoughby, who was the chief photographer.’ Barlow recalls being a copyboy for ACP in the 1950s and sneaking up to the dark room to see ‘the champion photographers developing. The magic was just enormous.’
Phelan was a cadet at the HWT in the 1950s and says ‘it was a great time. You’d go into the dark and get your films done, in a little dish; I used to count the time off in my head. I was taught to count … “Cattle dog one—that’s a second.”’ Andrew Meares, who is almost forty years younger than Brown, conveys a similar sense of wonder. ‘The magical waving of your hands to control light from the enlarger. The emergence of a print from a soup of chemicals. It was tangible. It was real and it was photography.’ Wylie elaborates: ‘Some of your best creations you didn’t see until you were in the darkroom. It was just magic; it was a lovely thing to see them in a different context after you’d taken the photo. Black and white was completely different too.’
It was didactic. Photographers on five of Rupert Murdoch’s Sydney newspapers used the same darkroom in the 1960s. For the SMH staff, cadets shared a smaller darkroom with graded photographers. Rick Stevens, whose career began in 1961 and who still works as a freelancer, describes the forty darkrooms used to process the film under the watchful eye of your mentor: ‘We had a corridor full of individual darkrooms and I held the record for the biggest party in one darkroom … I think we got fourteen people in … They were very small, narrow, had just a workbench and a cupboard to hang your clothes up in and that was it.’ The big work area was the ‘hive of activity at all times. There’s always somebody coming in, going out,’ Stevens says. ‘You saw everything that came through the darkroom and then when you saw it in the paper the next day, [you’d say], “Oh, well I developed that! … George Lipman took that, but I developed it!” It was a lot of fun and … most guys got on pretty well together.’
The cadets watched their mentors, who gave them hints but kept some of their ‘tricks’ to themselves. Phelan affectionately recalls the ‘senior guys’, who were very generous with their knowledge: ‘It was like a fraternity; if someone got a terrific picture, they’d say that was great.’ Verity Chambers, who began her cadetship in 1986, agrees: ‘The darkroom was like a collective training ground. There’s got to be something about the fact that it was dark, and lit by red light … People used to sing in there all the time. There was an atmosphere. Bob Finlayson, who was an absolute artist with printing, would spend hours helping young people learn little tricks on how to print.’ Wylie recalls ‘processing and developing film, all the while talking to someone about your experiences of the job you’ve just done—beautiful discussion all the time of what you had to do to get the picture. There was a lot of mentoring and support for the cadets. It was sometimes heated as well.’
Darkrooms not only functioned as technical spaces but also served as social, tribal places. It was where the photographers joked, chain-smoked and drank, the bar fridge filled with beer in the corner. But this varied between workplaces depending upon the proprietor’s indulgence. Older photographers who worked for both Keith and Rupert Murdoch at the HWT recall how neither man permitted booze on work premises. Less contested was the role of the darkroom as a place of solace after attending a particularly traumatic job, somewhere distressed photographers could gain their composure. At quiet times, they played cricket outside in the corridor or, at the HWT, on the roof. The darkroom also became a second home. ‘At the end of the week, you would often go to the pub and drink until late, and then sleep in the [SMH] darkroom,’ Meares recalls. The next morning, the photo editor would kick you awake and you’d go off to the races for the day to shoot the strip finishes for the form guide.
Collectively, the darkroom tends to be romanticised; individually, less idealistic revelations emerged. The darkroom was not always inviting and supportive. Hazing and unwelcome sexual advances occurred and were cryptically hinted at in the interviews or explicitly mentioned with enduring rage.11 Lorrie Graham, who was a female Fairfax cadet, describes the darkroom as a threatening space: ‘You just had to wear it. I mean, it’s where the alchemy happens … It’s where you see the imagery that you think you’re capturing come up in a tray. So it is actually quite a magical place to be. But it has also … well, it had for me, other connotations. You used to get little sort of individual darkrooms. So the person they put me in with … was the first groper I had to deal with … I just said, “I really don’t think this is appropriate” … “I just don’t think this is on” and so walked out … There was one fantastic old guy called Laurie Shea, who used to manage the darkrooms, who was like an uncle to me … I couldn’t confide in him about the sexual harassment but I felt I could confide in him about just not feeling great.’
The harassment wasn’t confined to women or generations. Julian Kingma, another former Fairfax and now freelance photographer, recalls the darkroom as ‘complete hell. It was a dark, horrible, depressing, archaic environment, and a far cry from what I imagined. I wondered what I had done.’ For Kingma, it was the darkroom staff who bullied him: ‘It was quite a hazing. I went home in tears a lot of the time. I still had the romance of becoming a photographer and knew it was possible. The darkroom staff just couldn’t wait to get you back to the darkroom to get you to do all the tasks they thought were beneath them. It was a pretty awful environment but photographers who weren’t in the darkroom encouraged me, and told me to take pictures in my free time.’ Bruce Howard remembers that over thirty years before, as a darkroom assistant at the HWT in 1951, he too was ‘given a rough time by some of the darkroom staff’.
The interviews also elicited contested memories about the workplace and logistical issues. The darkroom was good for printing pictures and sleeping off last night’s debauchery. ‘You could hide,’ explains Alan Porritt, formerly at the Telegraph and AAP. ‘But I don’t think … any news photographer would ever go back to a darkroom, ever. It’s so much easier these days.’ Brown speculates on the health effects of the chemicals: ‘Even when the processing of film became automatic, I would have black fingernails; it was the chemicals. We wouldn’t use gloves or tongs.’ According to Jay Town, who worked in Melbourne and Western Australia, one of the chemicals they used was called potassium ferricyanide: ‘This stuff, it was really deadly. And we used to just about swim in this stuff.’ The details are sometimes debated, but even the uncertain memories reveal potent moments. Other photographers mention that their nails went brown, as though they had heavy nicotine staining, and some contend that potassium ferricyanide was not extensively used in their workplaces. Kingma, though, is unforgiving: ‘You wouldn’t get away with any of that now; not only was it a health hazard with people smoking while they were printing, but it was so depressing. I went into a real hole.’
Away from the darkroom, photographers also had to have processes for developing photographs in more remote locations. ‘Before digital cameras, the obligation on the photographer was to work out how they’re going to get their pictures back. It was paramount. And for an evening newspaper, it was even more,’ Howard explains. ‘A better picture might come from somewhere else but not in time. No picture ever, no matter how good it is, is [any] good unless it gets to the paper on time.’ The process of getting a picture back to the paper in a format it can publish is one of the areas that has changed most dramatically.
In the 1920s, a new technology that enabled picturegrams to be transmitted between Melbourne and Sydney prompted much excitement. In 1934, the SMH received its first radiogram picture from London. Bryan Charlton, who was based in Adelaide, remembers that the picturegram equipment used by the Advertiser dated back to World War I, was bigger than a car and was housed at the post office.12 All overseas photos, known then as ‘radio photos’ (because they were sent using radio waves), were received on that machine, picked up from the post office and delivered to the paper as a large, wet negative. Their clarity was not always good because radio waves receive interference.
Baker recalls going to the post office in Perth at 6.30 in the morning to pick up the picturegrams of important overseas events. Most days there would be two picturegrams or, on busy days, six at the most.13 AP photographer Malcolm Browne’s extraordinary photograph of a Buddhist monk who burned himself to death at a busy intersection in Saigon in 1963 took more than fifteen hours to be flown to Singapore and then transmitted across 9000 miles of AP Wirephoto cable to New York, before it could be distributed to newspapers around the world.14
The HWT was an early adopter of picturegram-receiving equipment, possibly in the late 1940s.15 In Sydney, in 1953, the SMH and the Daily Telegraph both purchased their own picturegram equipment, with the Daily Telegraph taking out the honour of using theirs first.16 One of the first jobs cadets were given was collecting the picturegrams. Porritt, McAuley and Baker all began in the picturegram room in the 1960s. When Charlton started at the Advertiser in 1967, the paper had just installed its own picturegram machine. It was slightly bigger than a typewriter. In the second year of his cadetship, the paper sent a taxi to Charlton’s art school to get him back to work because Robert Kennedy had just been assassinated and the pictures from overseas were about to start coming through at the office. He was the only person who knew how to receive them.17
To complement its receiving machine, the Advertiser soon took possession of a new transmitting machine, which could send pictures from anywhere that photographers could tap into a phone line. In the early 1970s, when he was about twenty-three, Charlton was the first person to send a picture back to the Advertiser office, from the outback coalmining town of Leigh Creek. At other newspapers, photographers had been taking wirephoto equipment away with them since the mid 1950s. It weighed over 90 kilograms and required two men to carry it.18 Later, the equipment was slimmed down, and for country jobs, photographers would take their mobile darkroom in one big case with all the chemicals and an enlarger in it. They would go to someone’s house or a motel, blacken out the bathroom windows and turn it into a darkroom. They would do a 10 × 8" print with a long, white border for the caption to be added with a Texta. The machine transformed the black-and-white density into a sound that could be transmitted down the phone line.
Photographers recall setting up those makeshift darkrooms in places like hotel toilets using reams of black plastic and gaffer tape. John Ibbs, formerly of News Corporation, remembers, ‘It was so hot that you’re just standing there in your shorts or underwear and sweat pouring off you, trying to print, ripping the emulsion off film.’19 Five interstate photographers covering the royal tour in Cairns in 1954 worked in their underwear out of a dilapidated country studio trying to meet the edition deadlines of their papers.20 From the 1950s, photographers also started working out of ‘picture trucks’: driving a van around, taking photographs, transmitting them and then driving back.21 These were old ice-cream and pie trucks, or heavy-duty delivery vans, which had been converted into mobile darkrooms. The photographers developed negatives and made prints in the back of these vehicles. As a cadet, Steve Grove spent a lot of time in one of those vans and remembers how, in the heat of summer, he struggled to keep the chemicals at the right temperature.
Finding a phone line could also be a challenge. Ibbs would give the local Telecom tech a carton of beer in return for access to a line at the exchange.22 Craig Borrow explained how, once a line back to the office was established, the print was placed on a drum scan and a light beam slowly scanned the photograph, turning it into a series of beeps. These beeps were converted into a negative back at the office, which then had to be processed and printed once more. Each step reduced the quality and so, by the time the picture made it to the paper, it was generally of quite poor quality.
By around 1970, radio waves began to be replaced by satellites, which enabled faster transmission of clearer images.23 By around 1993, picturegram technology was superseded by film scanners, allowing photographers to scan a negative and send it down a phone line.24 This process was, in turn, superseded by digital technology in the late 1990s. Under the older processes, the time from taking a picture to delivering a print to the office would be measured in hours. With the advent of digital cameras and wi-fi technology, that time lapse has reduced to seconds. And where five or six picturegrams might have arrived from the post office each day, a picture editor will now receive thousands of images from which to select. Magowan, a former West Australian photographer, points out that in a pre-digital world, the transmission ‘was the special thing about press photographers … we were the only ones that could take the pictures, and get them back … [under] all conditions’ because ‘we had the technology to do it. No one else could do it. Whereas now, everyone can do it …’25 This means, as Baker observes, that instead of sending a photographer ‘to a far-away location to get a picture, the papers might now use one a local policeman, for instance, has taken’.26
The unique requirements of sports photography—having to capture fast-moving events in difficult lighting and weather conditions—have often driven technological innovation, from long lenses in the 1920s to early digital photography in the 1980s.27 Howard saw very early digital technology at work at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, and Town estimates that the first fully digital picture printed in an Australian paper appeared in 1993—of an AFL pre-season night grand final. The first mass roll-out of digital cameras at Australian newspapers was in 2000 for the Sydney Olympics.
Meares recalls the moment, two years earlier, when he first tried out a digital camera, in 1998 for the SMH, photographing a truck that went through a house at Narrabeen. Before, getting the pictures had been the easy part; it was sharing them with the paper that was difficult. As Meares sent the picture from the site using his laptop, he knew that everything had changed. The Advocate was one of the earliest Australian papers to go fully digital in 1999, and Grant Wells reveals that they ‘spent about a quarter of a million dollars to outfit five photographers’ as the camera bodies were ‘horrendously expensive’.
The 2000 Sydney Olympics were a key turning point. Howard recalls that the Herald Sun had forty-eight photographers shooting the 2000 Olympics in digital and two shooting colour film on roll-film cameras. These developments went beyond just the cameras. Photographers could only cover the Olympics with digital because they were able to file their images to a content-management system that could embrace the new technology.28 Ibbs recalls that his newspaper’s storage system for the 2000 Olympics had twelve terabytes of space, and it was all used up for the Olympics. They had all these digital images they couldn’t store, and ‘that’s still a huge problem’.29
The early digital camera technology was rudimentary. Freelance photographer Tony Ashby recalls the first digital cameras had ‘batteries that only lasted about thirty minutes’, and they ‘were huge’.30 Meares remembers the shutter lag, and how the cameras were hopeless with flash and had very small file sizes. When Meares went to East Timor in 1999, he had enough battery power in the satellite phone to move two pictures a day. Graham Tidy concludes that the first digital cameras were ‘awfully expensive’ and of ‘pretty awful’ quality. Porritt says they were ‘woeful’ and that ‘it took the [camera manufacturers] six attempts to get a decent camera’. Despite the limitations, Meares was an early convert to digital, willing to sacrifice quality because the technology allowed him to express himself and use a documentary model that he felt was more truthful. Digital also meant that he wasn’t impeded by geography; he could investigate whatever he wanted to.
The quality of digital cameras has improved dramatically, so that Peter McNamara says the ‘quality [now] is just sensational [and] getting better and better’. Porritt found that once the cameras had ‘36-megabyte files … you [could] do anything with that’. Meares argues that the developments in both cameras and wi-fi technology in the past fifteen years have been ‘astounding’. The quality now is so good, Meares says, that today’s digital cameras ‘make us all better photographers. You can go to a sporting event now and get it in focus, [whereas] in Craig Golding’s day, he was the expert because he could manually focus faster and better than anyone else’. With today’s digital cameras, photographers can now ‘pull pictures out of anywhere’, including out of the darkness of the 2014 Sydney siege and other situations that once would have posed technical challenges. By the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Meares had developed a wireless workflow, which meant he could get a picture back to Australia in seven seconds.
Unlike the mobile darkrooms and picturegrams of old, wi-fi, smart phones and iPads have made the process of transmitting photographs fast and distinctly mobile. AAP staff photographer Lukas Coch uses an iPad to add captions to photographs and send them back to the office in between walking ‘from one event to the other’. For photographers who started their career collecting picturegrams at the post office, the transformation is remarkable. But photographers who worked primarily in a pre-digital era see some drawbacks in the digital revolution. Clive Hyde, a veteran of almost fifty years, feels it is important to use all of your senses to take photographs. He would go off on assignment to Asia and come back with a hundred rolls of film and would not doubt himself, as he was used to hearing the motor drive and the shutter going off. But now, with digital, ‘even the click is muted’.
Ibbs says that one of the things he was taught was when to take a picture: ‘you watched, waited, became aware of what was happening, and decided when to take the picture’. Whereas these days, ‘the cameras do twenty frames a second and [the photographers] hope they get a good one’. To him, ‘that’s not the way you learn your craft. It should be through thinking, learning, watching and listening.’31 Others worry that digital makes photographers ‘lazy’ and too reliant upon looking at the back of their cameras rather than what is going on in front of them. In the pre-digital era, Bruce Postle, formerly of the Age, was more concerned about the impact of multiple shots on the subject than about the risk of running out of film. In an era when the time between taking each photograph was significantly longer and could involve having to load film, Postle believed that if a photographer could not get the photograph in two shots, they would never get it, because ‘by take three the subjects have lost confidence in the photographer and the life goes out of the picture’.32
But digital has also extended photographers’ skills and audiences. Phil Hillyard, Kate Geraghty and Chambers note how multimedia platforms have given photographers an audio voice, as well as a pictorial one, through formats such as Soundslides, which enable a photo story to be accompanied by audio. Chambers finds that ‘Looking at a gallery of images online or on an iPad is just wonderful. You’re so close to the image, whereas before you’d be separated through layers of newsprint.’ Prior to digital, there had been a process for how photographs were published. Meares explains that the pictures would go to the photo editor, he or she would present them at a conference, and a discussion would be had, but there ‘was never really an embracing of the leftovers’. Now, newspaper websites have begun to open up photo galleries, and photographers share their work through social media, including Twitter and Instagram, as well as having pictures published in newspapers and on newspaper websites. While a newspaper may only be able to use one image, now a series can be put up online—images that Chambers notes ‘would never have had an audience before beyond the photographic room’.
Photographers talk about how digital has extended their audience. Photographic editor Karleen Minney explains that ‘Page one still is a nice feeling but now we have different measurements and everyday our web team gives us [details of the] … top ten stories, and top ten clicked photo galleries … That’s our new, sort of, page-one measure. You look at that and go, “Oh that gallery I did, that’s up there.” You know, “People loved it.” … You see how many times it was shared on Facebook and Twitter and … there’s different, new measures now.’ Town says, ‘I was a huge fan of Instagram … I love Instagram. I’d rather have fifty hits, fifty likes on Instagram than page three of the Herald Sun … What I really like about Instagram is … getting your peers liking your pictures and stuff like that. Rather than people you don’t know … People whose work I admire and they’re coming back and say, “I like yours” … Pat each other on the back, sort of stuff … It’s just a nice way of getting stuff out there … I get to see what … one of my colleagues’ … favourite picture was, not what some sub decided should be going in the paper. So that’s … a big thing too.’
Digital photography has also made it possible for images to be altered very easily. Even before computers, photo manipulation was possible by piecing photographs or negatives together in the darkroom or by scratching them, or retouching them with ink or paint. Paint was used by George Berlin to alter the train accident photograph shown in Chapter 1, and Frank Hurley, one of Australia’s pre-eminent photographers, notoriously used the technique of composite printing when he combined up to twelve images into one. But the ease of digital manipulation and the incredible results it can achieve without detection have heightened debates about the ethics of news photography.33 At other times, the aim is not to hide the manipulation but to use it overtly as a form of visual editorialising (as discussed elsewhere in the book).
Both the overt and covert approaches to digital editing of photographs are controversial within the industry, but the extent to which digital editing is either performed or tolerated within newsrooms rarely comes to public attention. One case occurred in 2015, when an entry by a News Corporation photographer for the Walkley press photographer of the year award was withdrawn. It was revealed the photograph of a baby gorilla had been digitally altered to remove a piece of straw that was poking up behind the baby’s head. Louisa Graham of the Walkley Foundation stated that:
News is the ‘first draft of history’, and we rely on press photographers to present accurate and un-manipulated images. The terms and conditions [of the Walkley competition] clearly state ‘no cloning, montaging or digital manipulation other than cropping, digital spotting, burning and dodging is permitted’, and even superficial alterations can call into question the veracity of images.34
With only two major newspaper employers left in Australia, press photographers are industrially vulnerable and working in a highly concentrated newspaper market, and this may lead to greater pressures to alter images. A study by Grahame Griffin based upon a survey of 168 Australian news photographers in the early 1990s found that Australian press photographers tended to be less resistant to manipulating images than their American counterparts.35 Photojournalism academic Ken Kobré also argues that compared with their British and American counterparts, Australian picture editors’ attitudes to ‘truth’, cropping, and set-ups are more fluid and less clear.36 Tabloid photographers seem to have been especially vulnerable to a loss of autonomy over their work. Researcher Kerri Elgar found that Australian tabloid news photographers had less control over their final image than broadsheet newspaper photographers as well as lower levels of confidence in the ethics of their organisation.37 Job losses, casualisation and outsourcing in photography have exacerbated longstanding pressures and raised questions about the nature of press photographers’ autonomy and power within newsrooms.
Several of the photographers interviewed for this book view digital manipulation as part of a worrying de-professionalisation of their work and expressed concern that it brings their profession into disrepute. Some are concerned that news audiences could stop trusting news photographs if manipulation occurs. One Fairfax photographer notes that ‘it depends on the source. On Twitter, people might not believe [photographs], but institutions like the Age and the SMH have a history of trying to tell it straight.’ He concedes that there are amazing things photographers can do in terms of manipulating images, but they’re not allowed to, so they don’t, and that is why there have been very few instances of manipulation coming to light.
But there are varying views about what is acceptable in terms of digital editing and how it should be signalled to news audiences. One photographer admits that if he’s doing a portrait, he might do just a little bit of retouching if he likes the person, but whether that’s ethical or not, he isn’t sure. He thinks a little bit is fine, but if you seriously change something, he believes that should be acknowledged. Another photographer notes that ‘You might take something out of the background or darken it—that’s always been done [but] … If you starting manipulating, that’s a can of worms and something that needs to be looked at.’
Porritt says that ‘with digital, if you want to, you can change a picture … quite easily, but you’re going to get a hell of a lot of risk. I mean, there’s a code of ethics on digital that you don’t alter the picture without putting in the caption “digitally enhanced” or “digitally altered” … most media organisations agree to this. It’s not a hard-and-fast, by-law rule, but if you’re found out doing that and not saying, then your work doesn’t mean a thing. Like, Associated Press, Reuters, if they find that somebody’s altered a picture … then all those pictures that [the photographer has] ever taken … [are] wiped, because they can’t trust [them], which is the way to go.’
Others take middle-ground positions, contending that altering a picture ‘so that it made a more dramatic news picture … would be so wrong it’s not funny. But to tweak a picture, like contrast, darken something a bit, altering the shading or the contrast or whatever. You can still do that, but that’s legal … because you haven’t essentially altered the actual picture …’ Cropping, adjusting the colour balance, adjusting the brightness and contrast are put forward as subtle alterations that are acceptable so long as they aren’t ‘over the top’ or don’t change the nature of the photograph too much. One photographer also observes that ‘If a photographer [altered a picture] and didn’t tell [the paper], they’d get sacked … but the papers themselves can decide the general public [won’t want to see something] so they take [it] out [of the picture]’. This happened in 2004 with a photograph of the Madrid train bombings. Newspapers around the world published an image that showed victims on the train track next to a blown-out carriage. That image originally also showed a severed body part in the foreground, but papers used various means to take it out. Some cropped it out, others removed it using digital editing, and one newspaper in the United Kingdom darkened the tones of the body part so that it was beyond recognition and looked like a piece of debris on the railway tracks.
Current technology makes manipulation of photographs much easier, but as with the staging of photographs, there is a sense that attitudes have changed. Tidy points out that photographers today are actually much more careful, whereas ‘back in the darkroom days, you could do a fair bit [and] there have been times [when photographers did things they] shouldn’t have … for instance … photographed a golfer hitting a ball out of a bunker or something and [thought,] “Oh, the ball’s out of the picture. We better grab a ball and pop it in there.”… Those days are gone.’ He was ‘taught, when I first became a cadet, to compose your shot in the camera. Make sure you got the right exposure, and if all that works, you don’t need to do any manipulation. And I still carry that through in the digital era, too.’
Several photographers remember the manipulation of celebrity and fashion images in the pre-digital past. Waller, formerly of ACP, says, ‘People printed in clouds and sky. They held back people’s faces to hide any blemishes. The old Hollywood lighting [and how] they lit things brilliantly in those days … that was manipulation.’ There is also a sense that newspaper photography is being affected by changes in other genres and by how news audiences receive images today. Graham says that ‘one of the serious downsides of digital as well is how easily … they can be manipulated. That’s very scary … [I]t’s hugely common … you just have to look at some of those … limbs in Vogue magazine. People don’t have limbs that shape … They’re photographing people in a way that is not real anymore … particularly celebrities and fashion magazines and things like that … What that says to young girls, I don’t know, but that is not … an achievable look by a human being. There’s something very wrong about that.’
As newspapers take more photographs from other sources, such as government defence departments and celebrity publicists, this also means less certainty and more risk about whether an image may have been altered through digital means.
Autonomy in different workplaces has an impact not just on attitudes to digital manipulation but also on how photographers’ work is used within a newspaper or newspaper website. This was a key point of discussion in the interviews, with several Fairfax photographers saying that they feel they have significantly more autonomy and input into the final presentation of their work than News Corporation photographers have.
Some News Corporation photographers agree, but several point out that they feel better looked after in other ways at their organisation with some photographers suggesting they find News Corporation functions like a ‘family’, with a more caring and structured workplace than at Fairfax. There are different views about what is ‘best’ for a newspaper: strong editorial direction versus greater freedom and autonomy for individual photographers.
Meares argues that the corporate culture of the two remaining large newspaper companies differs. In his view, rival News Corporation is ‘more aggressive in acquiring graphic news pictures. They employ a midnight-to-dawn photographer, who chases things that happen with police and ambulances.’ He says News has a larger inventory of news photographs than Fairfax and more photographers on the ground in more places, so they have more opportunity. He also says that News has a more vibrant set-up culture. News Corporation’s editors have a greater influence on how they display things. Whereas Fairfax editors ‘have been more reserved; they rely on the brilliance of the photographer to extract something rather than the command and control method of forcing people to come back with a certain product’.
Lyndon Mechielsen from News Corporation argues that ‘the staff in Fairfax have a lot more input into the end product, have a lot more say over how and why things happen’, which is both ‘good and bad’. Bowers also sees some nuances in the debate around autonomy, arguing that News Corporation ‘has some of the finest photographers in Australia … [and] they’re hard to touch for their skill and their dedication and their … just love of the image … So this is not a reflection on them but there’s a culture [at News Corporation] … of you will do what you’re told, and you’ll do how you’re told, and you won’t back answer … And they used to look over the road at Fairfax and think we were anarchists, basically … [And] quite frankly, Fairfax could’ve done with a little iron fist at times, I think … [The News Limited/News Corporation model] reaps results because they would generally beat us on most things, I’ve got say. Not all the time, but on the big news jobs … they would take no prisoners and they’d generally win.’
Chambers, who worked for News Corporation and Fairfax, and freelanced for various agencies, observes that if a picture editor was ‘strong’, and had sway in the senior editorial circle, they were ‘able to influence the choice of the pictures and the important ones, such as the front page … [and] the non-photographic senior staff also have a lot of say, more so at Fairfax and the Sydney Morning Herald.’ But Bowers has a different recollection of his time as the SMH’s picture editor: ‘When I felt really strongly, I could go into bat but I never won [an argument with more senior executives over a picture]’. Grove feels he had more success as a picture editor at News Corporation, where ‘if I had a lot of faith in a picture, I would argue very strongly for it. In my experience, editors build confidence in their picture editors based on that; if you try and sell the editor a dud picture, he quickly loses faith in you.’
Mechielsen notes that the different economics underlying the two organisations produced different historical traditions: ‘Back in the day, Fairfax was a lot better resourced, so seemingly spoilt rotten with equipment and opportunities and all the rest of it … More money. They had a lot more advertising revenue, so classified ads. Being a broadsheet, they could squeeze … ads in … [whereas] tabloids, you can’t do that … That turned out to be a mixed blessing for them because News Limited’s always run, relatively speaking, on the smell of an oily rag or with not much indulgence. Fairfax are having to, unfortunately for them, get used to that now … because all that revenue’s just not there anymore … Fairfax always saw News Limited as poor cousins, photographically. You know …“You’d all really rather work for us” and “We’ve got more rights and we’re this and we’re that.” And things have switched a hundred and eighty degrees … They’ve Getty now, they outsource most of their photography …’ Mechielsen feels frustrated that ‘News Limited really doesn’t get a lot of credit for its commitment to news. You know, we [have] still got massive numbers of staff photographers … that are really expensive, massive numbers of journalists that are really expensive … So News Limited is still, you know, at this stage, committed to staff photographers. So there’s been something satisfying about that, ultimately, that at least we’re still there.’ The working lives of today’s press photographers look very different from those of previous generations, as they seek to embrace new technologies and survive in a rapidly evolving media environment.