Photographic Ethics – Interestingly Absent in the Trump Administration

It turns out, the Trump Administration encouraged, directly or through implication, the National Park Service’s photographer to deceptively edit the photographs of Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony to make the crowd appear larger then it really was.

Which frankly is pathetic.

In multiple senses.

It’s pathetic that Donald Trump would want pictures of the crowd at his inauguration edited.

And it’s pathetic that any photographer would comply with such a request. It is immoral to do so… as a public servant, such an individual has an obligation to the public, and should not be deceptively editing photographs to stroke a single man’s ego.

Apparently reality is infinitely malleable to the Trump Administration. Don’t like what somebody has to say about you? It’s all lies. Don’t like a media report? Fake news. Don’t like a book about you? It’s an elaborate Democratic party conspiracy.

Don’t like the fact that your photographs aren’t flattering? Deceptively edit them so that you see the world you want rather than what is.

Ethics, reality, it’s all gone. 

The world we live in is absurd.

“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

George Orwell’s 1984

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