Evidence, not Proof
Mike Johnston’s weekly column looks at the tricky issue of authenticity and the ethics of cooperating with your subject in photography:
“But, even for journalists, there is a very hazy line where enlisting cooperation is concerned. Someone in the photo.net thread mentioned the fact that Dorothea Lange may have “directed” the migrant mother and her children to get her famous Migrant Mother picture. But does that “lie” in any significant way about the reality of the situation? Roy Stryker, boss of the Farm Security Adminstration photographers, had this to say: “People would say to me, that migrant woman looks posed and I’d say she does not look posed. That picture is as uninvolved with the camera as any picture I’ve ever seen.”