The Los Angeles Times has dismissed staff photographer Brian Walski for combining two photos showing a British soldier and a crowd of Iraqi civilians. The composite of two photos taken moments apart in the Iraq war apparently was intended to heighten the apparent drama—as if a war wasn't already the epitome of drama.
The fakery, which the Times said Walski committed on his own, takes a minute to spot because it's not as obvious as you'd expect. To find it, look in the composite photo at the crouched civilian in white at the far left. The portion, running from just right of that civilian's red scarf over to the soldier's left leg, appears again just to the right of the soldier's right leg: The white back and pants thigh of that first civilian plus the head and black jacket of a civilian, plus another man's face. What makes it less obvious to spot is that the right-side slice includes an extra person's face in the middle.
The LAT ran all three photos (the two source originals and the composite fake) and by comparing them you can see that the same civilians appear in both originals, except for the middle man's face, who apparently moved between the first and second photo. So Walski didn't actually clone any of the people in the crowd, but instead used the soldier's legs as the seam between the two original photos. The upshot of the fakery is that the soldier appears to trying to halt the man carrying a child in his arms. Instead, the originals make it clear that the soldier is addressing the group as a whole—not in any way threatening the man and child. An already emotional moment has been completely warped, and its truth distorted.
Amazing that anyone (apparently an eagle-eyed reader) spotted it. But what's more amazing to ponder is how long it would take even a Photoshop pro to create such a subtle fake. This wasn't a casual Photoshop "accident." Based on the layering and/or masking required in Photoshop to achieve this, the intent to deceive seems clear. I worked with Walski years ago at the Albuquerque Journal and find it hard to imagine what he was thinking. While common in feature and fashion photography, this kind of thing is way outside the boundary of photojournalism. In juicing the photo, the photographer lost his way, and his job.
Followup: Walski himself says as much in a Poynter Institute piece about the fake.
5:11:13 PM 
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