Ethics in Doctoring a Photo

The course notes give an example of a doctored photo in which a man is show in a cycle workshop where this man had a plaster cast on hos foot as a result of an injury but in the image this is doctored. 

The course notes ask is it ethical to do this?

The link below describes a time line of Photo Manipulation Throughout History and raises some interesting points.

One is a quote from the National Geographic in which it is quoted as saying "We no longer use that technology to manipulate elements in an image simply to achieve a more compelling graphic effect". This was in response to an image that was altered so that it could comply with the magazines layout

http://ethicsinediting.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/photo-manipulation-through-history-a-timeline/

This link details a series of images that have been altered for a variety of reasons. As I have discussed in previous posts there is little doubt that the vast majority of digital images have received some manipulation even if it is discreet changes to white balance

The question of ethics is no doubt subject to each individual person's view but I would think that there are digital changes that are consider more or less acceptable. The alteration of facial images say to promote beauty products would be considered unethical as it would be suggesting the products are perhaps more capable than they are.

This type of change may compare to the manipulation of images from space where spectral emissions images captured digitally are changed from true colours to false colours; sometimes this changes are confirmed to the viewer.

Ethical changes to portraits may include the reduction or elimination of red eye often caused as a result of using a flash

Jerry Lodriguss in this link describes The Ethics Of Digital Manipulation and makes an interesting observation that photography in itself departs from reality because the capture of a single image is in actuality the unreality of the freezing of time. I would also contrast this to film makers where the appearance of continual movement in a film is actually a combination of a large number of individual frames and akin to the stick drawings we may all have made as children in the corner of pages in a book where flicking through individual images can give the appearance of movement

http://www.astropix.com/HTML/J_DIGIT/ETHICS.HTM

I agree with the statement Londriguss makes at the end where he says that the answer to the ethics of image manipulation "hovers somewhere around the line that gets crossed when the manipulation is done with the intent to deceive the viewer".

However as Michael Freeman correctly in my opinion describes photography as an art then Londriguss' statement "it is my job as an artist to present my interpretation of reality, and it is their job as viewers top accept it and get something from it, or not, and reject it."

So understanding this and looking back at the image in the course notes do what ethical issues does it raise?

I don't believe the photographer is setting out to deliberately deceive anyone in fact perhaps tries to restore reality since the man in the workshop will not always be wearing a plaster cast on his foot. For me in this particular situation the change has been made as a solution to a problem of having a model with an injured foot. The foot within the image is not a key element nor is it representing anything.

For me this change is ethical.

As an aside I have had mixed success when submitting digital images to stock libraries where their utilities examine the submitted images and identify what and the level of changes that have been made so that even changes commonly made during post processing have limits of what is and isn't acceptable.