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April 9, 2007

NEFARIOUS DARKROOM DEEDS?

As part of an online essay called “Re-Imaging History,” Wired.com has engendered a provocative -- and inaccurate -- discussion thread about who might have doctored this famous John Filo photograph, which shows the tragic aftermath at Kent State University in Ohio in 1970, when National Guardsmen opened fire on a crowd protesting U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, killing four students.

filo-thumb.gif
PHOTO (c) JOHN FILO

In the original photograph, which earned Filo a Pulitzer Prize, a pole or post appears behind the head of Mary Vecchio, who crouches in shock over the body of a student, her friend Jeffrey Miller, one of the four slain that day. The image has been published for years in magazines and newspapers, with the pole readily visible.

In the mid-1990s, when I was LIFE’s director of photography, the magazine published this image, below – with the pole somehow magically removed.

filo2-thumb.gif
PHOTO (c) JOHN FILO

Since I was also the editorial director of LIFE’s Web site at the time, having launched Lifemagazine.com around 1995, I was surprised when we started fielding e-mail traffic from readers who were incensed that a serious magazine of photojournalism had had the audacity to airbrush or Photoshop this classic picture so as to cosmetically extract the offending post behind Vecchio’s head. How dare we?, they asked.

Bewildered, I placed a call to what was then called the Time-Life Picture Collection and ordered up the existing image – not the digital scan but the actual print that the art and production teams had scanned for use in the magazine. The archive, in fact, delivered two photographs, vintage prints of both versions shown above.

The first photo, with the pole, had run in Time and LIFE on several occasions. I could easily determine its storied history in the pages of Time Inc. magazines because the back of the photo was imprinted with the stamp of each publication, including the issue date – a time-honored practice at the company, in those days, that gave a sort of thumbnail provenance for every published picture.

Then, I became truly bewildered. The second photograph, without the pole, was stamped with even more markings on the reverse side. This version had also run in Time and LIFE. And People magazine as well. Many times. More times, in fact, than its pole-toting partner. And it had been published repeatedly over the course of 25 years, without anyone seeming to notice the absence of the pole.

But who had taken the liberty of removing the post in the first place? And when had he or she done so? And why had no one ever complained about the seeming discrepancy between two distinct versions of a classic image, both re-published repeatedly, only to be returned safely and snugly to the photo archive?

I decided at the time to go to the source. I placed a call to the photographer, John Filo. And John admitted, quite candidly, that he had removed the pole, years previously, removing it either by retouching or through some darkroom sleight-of-hand. He didn’t like the pole. He said he found it distracting. It was his picture, and he simply removed it when he made the subsequent print.

Mystery solved. No Photoshop shenanigans. No editorial Botox. In the 1970s, two images had made their way into the photographic slipstream, courtesy of the photographer himself, and the pictures had lived out parallel lives in our collective visual unconscious.

Only in the age of the Internet, when people have time on their hands and the tools for making endless comparisons between different arrays of data, is it possible to notice such alterations. In some cases, these differences can prove significant, even newsworthy. It was computer-sleuthing pure and simple, for example, that raised questions about the authenticity of the documents upon which 60 Minutes II had based its story of George W. Bush’s deferred military service. Whether or not the documents were indeed forgeries, an army of latter-day Sherlock-Holmeses had posted perceived discrepancies on their blogs, poking holes in the underlying story itself, which soon began to unravel. After a protracted internal review, the documents were discounted (their provenance murky, at best), the reputation of CBS News was tarnished, and the careers of several of the network’s best journalists and top executives were irrevocably altered.

In most cases, however, such concentration on minutiae, such Inflation of The Innocuous, serves to divert our focus from more important matters -- and to squander hours, days, lifetimes. We devote too much of our attention to the poles behind the crouching women, too little to The Bigger Picture. In the case of the Filo photo: students were killed while protesting an unjust, unnecessary war. Today, it seems, very few are out there protesting an unjust, unnecessary war. We’re just sitting at our computers, safely whining to one another, or to no one at all, as a distant war drags on.

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