Kent State - ©John Filo
One of the iconic photographs of the Vietnam War protest era is one taken by Kent State University photography student John Filo on May 4th, 1970 – the day of the “Kent State Massacre” in which four students were shot dead by the National Guard.
Filo was a senior at Kent State that year. He had been out of town for several days – over the weekend, and so he had missed a lot of the “excitement” – students were protesting President Nixon’s April 30th announcement that the US was bombing Cambodia. There were protests early Friday Morning followed by some violence around the bars that night. On Saturday, May 2nd the town’s mayor announced a state of emergency and requested help from the Governor. Ohio Governor James Rhodes sent in the National Guard, who arrived at about 10 PM. By that time, the campus’s ROTC building was burning. Sunday was relatively quiet, with some students cleaning up downtown areas after the rioting. There was a threat of marital law and a curfew.
On Monday, May 4th things got out of hand. Filo had returned from his weekend away. He was working in the schools photo lab (his job) and broke for lunch and to take some photographs of the action. He just wanted one good photograph, which he soon got – a student waving a black flag in front of the National Guard, which ran full page in the subsequent Life article (May 15, 1970, p. 30). Priding himself on getting a great shot, he wandered around, and took a total of two rolls of film before, during and after the shooting (at first he believed they were firring blanks). The photo that is the subject of this paper is of 14 year old Mary Ann Vecchio crying over the body of student Jeffery Miller.
No legal issues were ever raised over this photograph – not only is it legal to take photographs on a public university campus, John was actually a student there. Apparently the National Guard, who had been on campus since 10 PM Saturday, had not issued any restrictions on photography on campus, although they may have been able to – if a state of marital law had indeed been declared (it hadn’t – it was only threatened). In the spirit of the times I don’t think the police, university officials or National Guard ever considered banning photography at Kent State – I don’t know off hand of any case where photographers were banned anywhere in the 1960′s, including race riots, National Conventions, protests or even in Vietnam itself. This would probably not be true today – I believe the government learned it’s lesson during Vietnam in so far as giving photographers unrestricted access to war zones. He also did not need any model releases, as the image was never used to sell or promote any products.
There are considerable ethical issues revolving around this photograph, however. It is, in fact, considered one of the best examples of a manipulated image reaching the public (well before Photoshop) as at some point in the early 1970′s Time Magazine (?) removed a pole that was apparently sticking out of Vecchio’s head. Time has all of it’s articles on line, unfortunately without photos. Life ran the altered image in an article in May, 1995. David Friend, Life’s Director of Photography, attempted to justify this use – he stated that “LIFE did not and does not manipulate news photos. The photo we published was supplied to us by our photo library–the Time-Life Picture Collection….Amazingly, the fence post had been airbrushed out by someone, now anonymous, in a darkroom sometime in the early 1970′s. The picture had run numerous times–without the fencepost, and without anyone taking notice–in TIME (Nov. 6, 1972, p. 23) PEOPLE (May 2, 1977, p. 37), TIME (Jan. 7, 1980, p. 45), PEOPLE (April 31, 1990, p. 117) to name just a few publications. ….while closing our May (1995) issue, (we) contacted photographer John Filo, hoping to secure a repro quality print, as is customary at LIFE. Since we could not obtain a print from him directly in time to make our run, we went with the photo we had, not realizing a pole had been removed. One can only wonder why the missing pole hasn’t been noticed the previous times it has appeared, even though literally millions of people have seen the fence-post-less photo in publications dating back 23 years. At no time would LIFE’s photo, art or production department intentionally alter a news photograph.” (taken from the NPPA-L – and found at http://journalism_jobs.tripod.com/a.filo.html) This is indeed interesting – an unknown individual altered this photograph in the early 1970′s and the altered version seems to have become the standard.
This brings up a greater concern – an altered image ending up in one of the largest image collections in the world (Time-Life Picture Collection) in an altered state, and no one even knows who altered it or when! I believe that Time, Life and People were all owned by the same company when this controversy erupted in 1995, and all publications probably accessed the same altered image in the same photo library. What happens in the long run, if altered images “slip” into large photo data bases, each accessed by numerous publications – this is starting to look very “1984″ish to me!
More importantly, this issue brings to fore the “slippery slope” argument of how much, if any, manipulation is acceptable in photojournalism. The fact is that air brushing away the pole sticking out of Mary Ann’s head did not change the meaning of the photograph one iota. It just makes for a better composition. However, if we are allowed to remove errant posts, then why not change colors – simply altering the color of the sky got photojournalist Patrick Schneider fired from the Charlotte Observer (see p. 388, text). As this issue of altering photographs is a slippery slope argument, there is no place on the slope where a line can be drawn. By definition. Removing poles, changing colors, rearranging people – pretty soon we’re in fantasy land!
Fantasy land may be all right with certain magazines, however even then it should be clearly labeled as a manipulated photograph. However in the news business the photojournalist’s job is to show it as it is – he/she can not set foot on that slippery slope!
There are other, less tangible ethical issues related to this photograph and how it was presented to the public. Although I was only ten when this image was published, I have seen it many times over the years and I had always assumed that Mary Ann Vecchio was a Kent State student, crying over the loss of one of her classmates or friends. However, she was in fact a fourteen year old run away from Florida who just happened to be wandering about Kent State at the time of the shootings. She was not a student, she was not an anti-war protester, she didn’t even know anyone in Kent, Ohio. It was not until ten or fifteen years after the event that I saw a 60 Minutes piece on Kent State in general and this photograph in particular, and found out the truth. This issue has more to do with the caption – that is to say, the way this photograph was presented in the media, than the photograph itself. The photograph has a different meaning if one conceives it as a student bewailing a fallen friend, as opposed to some stranger who just happened to be in the neighborhood.
In any case, this photograph was certainly a score for John Filo, as shooting a Pulitzer Prize winning photograph while still in school most certainly helped further his career in photojournalism! And it’s also a good subject for the study of ethics in photojournalism, as this small after the fact alteration, which didn’t fundamentally change the meaning of the image, really brings to fore the importance of not altering an image!
