I live in South End. South End is my neighbourhood. What I find fascinating about it are not its poor or its rich or its middle class, but the fact that in a space of few blocks they all live as neighbours, which I think is very good and very important. It is also very rare in a world where middle class is chasing the suburban dream, the rich are so disconnected from the world that its not even funny and the poor are left to scramble for what they can get. Would I like to see the South End cleaner and prettier and well cared for? Yes. But, I certainly don’t want to see it turned into a ghetto of the ‘right people’ only. So, there are all sorts of people in my South End photographs and I hope that it’s going to stay that way. Folks in this photo are playing some sort of bocce game in the Queen’s Square.

With that out of the way, I would like to draw your attention to something else. Fluide Effect is a media company that specializes in photo manipulation and they are absolutely fantastic at what they do. Check out the Before/After section in their portfolio and you’ll see what I mean. The only problem is that their clients include, among many, many others, Time and Newsweek magazines. Yeah, that Time and Newsweek.

I have huge problem with manipulated photographs that appear on the covers and inside pages of the magazines across the world. I don’t think that the readers understand how far the photo-manipulation in the media goes. This is bad for photojournalists whose names appear underneath the manipulated photographs and its even worse for the readers who are already annoyed by the media. This reckless manipulation of reality is not going to help us do our jobs better. We also know that fake photographs can cause serious problems that go way beyond the lost trust of our readers. A Canadian non-profit organization Media Awareness Network has a wide range of resources and articles on media education such as this one on the images of women in the media. The fact that we are now doing it to the men as well is NOT what feminists called for when they demanded equality and respect.

Various media organizations are being proactive and like Toronto Star and the National News Photographers Association have created their own no-nonsense codes of ethics. NPPA is especially active in the area of photojournalism ethics and it has a range of resources on their web site.

Before I go and do something useful I want to share a couple of links. Here is amazing work of 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner Todd Heisler from Rocky Mountain News. If you have an hour or so enjoy the short films featuring the work of some of today’s best photojournalists here. These are really short films so you can watch them one at a time...

Also, take a look at what Canadian Reuters photographers can do.