What is the First Amendment?
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Public universities are particularly rich grounds for conflict over matters of speech. They bring together persons with often strongly held yet contradictory views. Universities, for example, have their own newspapers, some of which may be operated by the university, by the students or by an off-campus group. Public institutions in their diversity often have students and faculty of different political persuasions, sexual orientations, and religious commitments. Moreover, one of the driving concepts of the university campus is academic freedom, the right to inquire broadly, to question and to promote an environment where wrong answers, seemingly absurd ideas and unconventional thought are not just permitted but even encouraged.
But the issue of free expression on campus goes beyond speech codes and involves a host of other matters. They include outspoken university faculty; technologically mediated discussions that, through the internet, transcend the requirements of time and place so essential to traditional First Amendment analysis; visiting speakers expressing controversial views; the use of student fees to support gay, lesbian and other organizations; the reporting and editorializing of the campus newspaper; artistic expression; and the faculty’s freedom to pursue, publish and proclaim their research findings. In each of these instances, the underlying issue for a university is its duty to teach its students the lessons of responsibility that accompany the privilege of academic freedom. As photo journalism students, we can take photographs on and off the campus of our university and obtain the necessary information to inform and transmit a message to the public through the newspaper or the website of our university.
The various ways of exercising journalism, whether through images, words or ideas, can be valid or questionable according to the journalist’s ideology. By recording a fact and communicating it the photographer reflects his personal way of seeing. Choose a point of view. The content of his message is framed in his own convictions or moral norms.
A step beyond editing, which as we have seen is lawful and acceptable when done without excess and with common sense, is the manipulation, where the image is adulterated. That is, they remove or add elements to distort the reality captured for some purpose. A subject, incidentally, that is not precisely recent and has been present throughout the history of photography.
