A picture is no longer worth a thousand words

Which photograph of Lance Cpl. Ted Boudreaux and two boys in the desert is the real thing? No one knows for sure, in the age of Photoshop.

By Farhad Manjoo

April 22, 2004 | In early April, Ibrahim Hooper, the communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), received a mysterious photograph in his e-mail in box. The picture shows a white man dressed in military uniform standing with two dark-skinned boys in what appears to be a desert setting. Behind them is a ramshackle structure, perhaps a cabin or a makeshift bunker. The man and the boys are under this structure's lean-to roof, posing, happily, for the camera. The man grins, the boys smile shyly, and all flash a thumbs-up sign. Despite their apparent mirth, however, something is amiss with the scene. One of the boys is holding up a piece of cardboard on which, in black marker, is scrawled a chilling message: "Lcpl Boudreaux killed my dad. then he knocked up my sister!"

Although the picture contains no clues to the scene's location or date, to Ibrahim Hooper and CAIR -- an Islamic rights group that opposed the war in Iraq -- the story the image told seemed clear: The photograph shows an American soldier ridiculing two Iraqi children by making them hold up a sign they don't understand, CAIR concluded. "If the United States Army is seeking to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, this is the wrong way to accomplish that goal," Nihad Awad, CAIR's executive director, said in a press release issued on April 2.

In response, the military, which determined that the soldier in the picture was a Marine reservist -- Lance Cpl. Ted J. Boudreaux of Thibodaux, La. -- launched an investigation. News of the probe sparked a small outcry against Boudreaux; his local newspaper said he had "embarrassed himself, the Marine Corps and, unfortunately, his home state."

But the anti-Boudreaux fulmination appears to be have been, at the very least, premature, because nobody can determine whether the picture CAIR received is authentic. Boudreaux has told the Marines that the photo is not real. And, indeed, just as the military's investigation got underway, several other versions of the picture began popping up online. Some were obviously doctored -- one version, posted on a Usenet newsgroup, has the boys holding a sign that reads, "We wanna see Jessca Simpson!" But at least one other picture found online appears just as real as the image CAIR received -- and this one has the boys holding a sign with a decidedly friendlier message: "Lcpl Boudreaux saved my dad. then he rescued my sister!"

Which picture is the real picture? It appears impossible to tell -- even experts in digital imaging are cautious in venturing a guess.

The Boudreaux story illustrates, once again, the emerging weakness of photography in a digital age. There was a time when photographs were synonymous with truth -- when you could be sure that what you saw in a picture actually occurred. In today's Photoshop world, all that has changed. Pictures are endlessly pliable. Photographs (and even videos) are now merely as good as words -- approximations of reality at best, subtle (or outright) distortions of truth at worst. Is that Jane Fonda next to John Kerry at an antiwar rally? No, it isn't; if you thought so, you're a fool for trusting your own eyes.

Some photographers welcome the new skepticism toward images; it's good that people are learning not to automatically believe what they see, they say. But many fear that we're losing an important foothold on reality. Without trustworthy photographs, how will we ever know what in our world is real?

"One of the founders of Doctors Without Borders once said, 'Without a photograph there is no massacre,'" says Fred Ritchin, a professor of photography at New York University. "You can say Tiananmen Square happened -- there was a video, there was a massacre. But if we typically disbelieve the evidence of a photograph, then when the Chinese government says there's no massacre, what are you going to hold up against that?"

Next page: The question "who do you trust" becomes paramount