A photo in question

The New York Times has pulled from its online site a photo essay that originally appeared Sunday over several pages in the New York Times Magazine. An editor’s note explains:

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.

PDNPulse.com — a photography blog run by the editors of Photo District News — has reprinted the photos in question and specific details to document the alterations.

From PDNPulse:

The New York Times Magazine has withdrawn a photo essay by Edgar Martins - described in print as having been produced “without digital manipulation” - because several of the photographs show signs of digital manipulation. The photo essay, which ran in the July 5 issue of the magazine, shows abandoned real estate projects.

Working from a copy of the Times Magazine, PDN has identified evidence of manipulation in three of Martin’s six published photos. A blogger first noticed the project was suspect based on a photo that ran online only.

In all four cases, unlikely repetitions of elements suggest that they are composites or have had some elements covered up.

One picture shows an evenly-lit room in an unsold mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. The room appears near-perfect in its symmetry, down to have two identical thermostats and light switch plates facing each other on opposite walls. There are also repeating patterns in the leaves on the floor.