The New York Post sparked a firestorm of controversy last week after publishing a photo of a man about to be struck by a subway train. People around the world were outraged that a photographer decided to photograph what had occurred, that he had sold (or, in the photographer’s words, licensed) the photo to a newspaper, and that the paper decided to publish it with a sensationalist front page story.
The New York Times found an eerily similar story on its hands this week, but its handling of the situation — and the subsequent public reaction to the article — has been drastically different.
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Reynaldo Dagsa, a local councilman in Manila, Philippines, was celebrating on New Year’s Eve with his family when he was shot in the chest and later died on the way to the hospital. His family later discovered that Dagsa had accidentally captured his killer on camera while taking a picture of his wife and daughter moments before he was shot.
The photo was handed over to police and the Philippine Daily Inquirer, which published the photo on its front page. This resulted in the identification and arrest of the assassin, a suspected car thief named Michael Gonzales whose arrest was ordered by Dagsa last year. A lookout named Rommel Oliva was also captured on camera (seen to Gonzales’ right) and is being hunted by police.
Perpignan, France is known in the photography world for the international photojournalism festival (Visa pour l’Image) it hosts every year, but recently it made photo-related news for quite a different reason — earlier this week a mentally-ill 47-year-old woman murdered her sister… with a tripod. Yikes…
Image credit: Image based on Vintage Clue game cards (weapons) by OnFoot4now
A Venezuelan court ordered newspaper El Nacional not to print violent images after the paper published a controversial image of dead bodies piled up in a Caracas morgue.
The photo, taken by an El Nacional photographer in December, ran with a story last Friday about security problems in the country. On Monday, the image was picked up by another newspaper, Tal Cual.
The Venezuelan government deemed the decision to run the photo as a part of a campaign criticizing current president Hugo Chavez, in light of the upcoming September elections.
The court ordered El Nacional and Tal Cual to not publish violent photos, saying the ruling is to protect children:
“(The print media) should abstain from publishing violent, bloody or grotesque images, whether of crime or not, that in one way or another threaten the moral and psychological state of children.”
El Nacional responded to the ruling on Wednesday by running a front-page story about what they call censorship, along with large blank spaces with “Censored” stamped across where photos usually run. Read more…
