A Picture Tells a Thousand Lies

H. Farid

New Scientist, 179(2411):38-41, Sept. 6, 2003

paper not available on-line

It had all the hallmarks of a prizewinning war photograph. Under hostile fire, an armed British soldier towered over an Iraqi man carrying a baby and directed him to take cover. The composition was perfect. Delighted with the image, photographer Brian Walski emailed it to his employer , the Los Angeles Times , who promptly splashed it on the front page of the 31 March 2003 edition. But all was not as it seemed.

A keen-eyed editor on the The Hartford Courant - a sister paper of the Los Angeles Times - noticed that civilians in the background appeared twice in Walski's photo. The Los Angeles Times immediately called Walski for an explanation. Walski confessed he had artificially created the photograph by combining two separate images. Outraged, the paper fired him.

A period of soul searching followed in media circles: if we can't trust a seasoned professional like Walski, wondered the pundits, who can we trust? One would assume that the Los Angeles Times editors didn't publish the fake knowingly, but could they have spotted it more easily and avoided the embarrassment? What if Walski had somehow managed to obscure the duplicated figures that the Courant editor spotted, could the tampering still have been detected before the papers went to press? I believe that the answer is yes. Furthermore, along with my colleagues at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, I have developed a system that makes the passive detection of digital tampering possible.