Ethical consideration
Presentation aids can be powerful, but they can also deceive. They can raise challenging ethical questions.
For example, the most famous photographer of the Civil War, Matthew Brady, rearranged bodies on the battlefield to enhance the impact of his pictures. Eighty years later, another American war photographer carefully staged the now celebrated photograph of marines planting the flag at Iwo Jima.
Fifty years after that, Time magazine electronically manipulated a cover photograph of 0. J. Simpson to “darken it and achieve a brooding, menacing quality.”° On the one hand, these famous images may be fabrications: They pretend to be what they are not. On the other hand, they may bring home the reality they represent more forcefully.
In other words, the form of the photos is a lie, but the lie may work to reveal a deeper truth. Are these photographs unethical, or are they simply artistic?
Perhaps we can agree that with today’s technology, the potential for abuse looms quite large. Video editing easily produces illusions of reality. Consider how movie makers depicted Forrest Gump shaking hands with Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. Or call to mind the image of the late Fred Astaire dancing with a vacuum cleaner in a recent television commercial.
In movies and ads, such distortions can be amusing. When they purportedly convey real-life images, as when television networks and newspapers “stage” crashes and other visuals to make their stories more dramatic without letting us in on the artifice, they can be quite deceptive.
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