A photographer whose work appeared in the New York Times Magazine has been accused of digitally manipulating his images. Edgar Martins produced a photo essay entitled "Ruins of the Second Gilded Age." It showed abandoned buildings/construction projects and was featured in the magazine and on the Times website. After commenters on MetaFilter raised questions about the authenticity of the images, the magazine pulled the slideshow from the website ...
The slideshow page in question gives this explanation:
Editors' Note: July 8, 2009
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.
The truth is that the images from the photo essay are still available on NYTimes.com. One of the links in the original Metafilter post reporting the manupulations gives the URL format: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/06/30/magazine/05gilded.1.jpg. Simply change the final number to view each of the images. I don't know how many images were included in the original essay, but I used this method to view images numbered 1 through 11. Image 2 is the one that first raised suspicions of digital manipulation.
The images were all still available as of just before 11 p.m. Eastern time on 7/17/09, 9 days after the Editors' Note shown/linked above that claimed the images had been removed. Clearly only the navigation was removed, not the images themselves.
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