WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?
A Footnote to an Editors' Note

Above: New York Times, Friday, Sept. 20, 2002

The photo above ran in the national edition of The New York Times on September 20, the fruits of a difficult assignment earlier that week. Times photographer Edward Keating’s job had been to illustrate a community in Lackawanna, New York, that was home to six men of Yemeni descent accused of being part of an al Qaeda sleeper cell. The shot was pulled from later editions after editors decided that it was not relevant to the story.

But the picture had another problem, and what happened after Keating pushed the button sheds light on how seriously photojournalists and their editors take the job of recording reality.

By September 16, three days after the suspects were arrested, national and local media were combing Lackawanna for follow-up stories. Late in the afternoon, Keating and Times reporter Marc Santora turned up at the intersection of Wilkesbarre and Lebanon streets, where FBI agents had raided a grocery store. The store was closed, but across the street was a house with a porch full of people, including six-year-old Brandon Benzo and his mother. Journalists had dropped by throughout the day to gather quotes and borrow the bathroom. Some had kidded around with Brandon, who was playing with a toy gun.

When Keating got his shot, the only journalists on the scene — other than Keating and Santora — were three photographers: Charles Lewis, of The Buffalo News; Shawn Dowd, of The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle; and David Duprey, of The Associated Press in Buffalo. They watched Keating walk with Brandon across Lebanon Street from his house to the store, pose him on the steps of the store and on a ledge running across the front of the store, and take pictures. “It looked like a fashion shoot,” says Dowd. “The photographer was pointing or gesturing to the boy. The boy looked right and left, pointed the gun in different directions. We were all looking at each other like we can’t believe this is happening.” Dowd photographed Keating as he photographed Brandon (left). Duprey went over to Keating and asked him who he was. (AP spokesman Jack Stokes says corporate policy does not allow Duprey to speak on the record.)

None of the three heard the conversation between Keating and the boy, but Dowd and Lewis felt it was clear that Keating had orchestrated the photo. “Had this been a genuine moment,” says Lewis, “we would have been all over it.”

Back in their newsrooms, Dowd complained to a colleague who complained to CJR. Joan Rosen, an AP photo editor, says that after hearing Duprey’s concern she instructed her photo desk to not pick up the shot. Lewis’s complaint was relayed by an editor at The Buffalo News to Times picture editor Margaret O’Connor.

Thus, two investigations ensued: CJR’s, and the Times’s to see if its rules against posing news photos had been broken. The Times’s initial investigation turned up nothing definitive, only differing interpretations about what Keating did. But the editors revisited it after hearing additional information from CJR.

On October 25, the Times published an Editors' Note that says Keating acknowledged “that the boy’s gesture had not been spontaneous,” and that the paper “regrets this violation of its policy on journalistic integrity.” Keating, for his part, says the accusations are “totally false,” but declined to elaborate or address the Editors' Note. Times editors, when asked about Keating’s denial, said only that “The Editors' Note speaks for the paper.”

The incident gets at an ongoing debate in photojournalism. Kenny Irby, who teaches photo ethics at the Poynter Institute, says that there has been a broadening of what is considered legitimate in photojournalism. The key, he says, is the photographer’s intent, which should be made clear to the reader. “What is the purpose of the photo?” he asks. If it is to illustrate, he says, then there is more creative license. If the purpose is to report, he says, then the photo must accurately and honestly represent the experience as it was revealed to the photographer. The Times apparently concluded that in this case that standard wasn’t met.

— Brent Cunningham, with Gloria Cooper and Adeel Hassan

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