DOH!
The photographer, Edgar Martins, has apparently been fooling everybody for years, but it’s just the bad luck of the New York Times that his photoshopping fraud is discovered in a “picture essay” they ran in print this past Sunday in the Times Magazine, as well as online. The Times has removed the online slideshow, and replaced it with the egg-on-face “Editors’ Note” shown above, which reads:
“A picture essay in The Times Magazine on Sunday and an expanded slide show on NYTimes.com entitled ‘Ruins of the Second Gilded Age’ showed large housing construction projects across the United States that came to a halt, often half-finished, when the housing market collapsed. The introduction said that the photographer, a freelancer based in Bedford, England, ‘creates his images with long exposures but without digital manipulation.’
“A reader, however, discovered on close examination that one of the pictures was digitally altered, apparently for aesthetic reasons. Editors later confronted the photographer and determined that most of the images did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show. Had the editors known that the photographs had been digitally manipulated, they would not have published the picture essay, which has been removed from NYTimes.com.”
Credit for catching the photographer’s “bullshit” goes to user “unixrat” in the ever-expanding comments section of the MetaFilter article:
I call bullshit on this not being photoshopped. Look at that wooden ‘triangle’ right near the top center.
posted by unixrat at 9:51 AM on July 7 [10 favorites]
You can see the damning evidence on the Photo District News’ PDN Pulse blog.
I cancelled my subscription to The Times years ago, although I still have a subscription to their crosswords. Although I don’t have much respect left for their reporting (yeah, like their Atlantic Yards non-coverage), I’m almost beginning to feel sorry for the old gray lady. Like a fading beauty queen, as she gets on in years, is not quite so graceful on the red carpet as she used to be. A bit wobbly on her stilettos, a broken heal a very real possibility, perpetually a half step behind the younger, more nimble upstarts, she knows its just a matter of time. One day, she’ll likely fade into obscurity.
