Aesthetics versus Ethics – Manipulation of a Caption but not the Image

Author : Pam Morris March 15 2015

Sometimes it isn’t the image that is manipulated but the corresponding caption purporting to describe what the image is showing.  The famous photo of the Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange (Figure 12) was captioned with “Seven hungry children. Father is native Californian. Destitute in pea pickers’ camp … because of failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tires to buy food.” [i] It was primarily the publishing of this image which spurred the US federal government to immediately send 20,000 pounds of food to the pea picker’s camp.  In fact the caption written by Lange was a pure fabrication, the woman in the photo Florence Owens Thompson was in fact an itinerant worker, but was not a resident of the camp; she was photographed near the camp whilst waiting for her husband and sons to return from town with a radiator part to fix their car.  This begs us to ask the question; does the end justify the means? Is it acceptable to not manipulate the image but to bend the truth regarding its circumstance?