NEW YORK, NY (July 9, 2009) – A photographic essay by Portuguese photographer Edgar Martins published in The New York Times Magazine on Sunday and posted on the newspaper's Web site was discovered to contain images that had been digitally altered. The essay has been pulled from the Times' Web site and editors have released two statements about the breach.
Bloggers at MetaFilter.com apparently first discovered the digital alternation of Martin's photographs in the online version, an essay about American home construction projects that stand idle and unfinished due to the economic crisis. A poster named "unixrat" links to Martins' digitally altered photographs early in the discussion thread: "I call bullshit on this not being photoshopped," unixrat wrote, and, "Check it out. I'll eat my hat if this is not fakery."
The Times pulled the essay from their Web site, first with a brief note that said questions had been raised about the authenticity of the images, and then yesterday editors posted an expanded explanation.
The first short note said, "The pictures in this feature were removed after questions were raised about whether they had been digitally altered."
Then the expanded statement posted yesterday said:
A picture essay in The Times Magazine on Sunday and an expanded slide show on NYTimes.com entitled "Ruins of the Second Gilded Age" showed large housing construction projects across the United States that came to a halt, often half-finished, when the housing market collapsed. The introduction said that the photographer, a freelancer based in Bedford, England, "creates his images with long exposures but without digital manipulation."
A reader, however, discovered on close examination that one of the pictures was digitally altered, apparently for aesthetic reasons. Editors later confronted the photographer and determined that most of the images did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show. Had the editors known that the photographs had been digitally manipulated, they would not have published the picture essay, which has been removed from NYTimes.com.
The Times' statement credits "a reader" with discovering the alternations, not MetaFilter's unixrat or Times editors. To their credit, Times blogger David W. Dunlap has written "Behind The Scenes: Digital Manipulation" with more details about the altered essay on The New York Times' new photography blog, Lens.
