staging

Andrell Bower
David Wertheimer began his article on staging with an example of photographers taking unstaged photos and the television reporter shooting staged video. If someone had asked me a couple years ago whether I thought television or print news was more likely to be staged, I would have said television. After working at small Missouri newspaper, I'm wiser. The photographer there would frequently stage "candid" moments. I was a new reporter and wasn't sure of asserting myself on the subject, but I was mortified. Even the editor above me seemed to be more concerned with getting a compelling shot than the ethics of using staged photos. Of course, I never once witnessed the reporters for the local television news staging anything. It seems to me that the points Wertheimer and Al Tompkins make about staging are mostly no-brainers, but apparently even some veteran photographers don't get it.
Of course, there are some gray areas, especially with putting audio and video or still photography together. I already ran into this issue with my Big Canoe radio story. I had done an interview at a member's home several weeks before the assignment was due, but I needed some natural sound gathered from one of their farming activities. Of course, this person wasn't going to be at the farm before I needed audio, so I simply went to the site and recorded the outdoors without him. When it came time to decide how to use the natural sound in my story, I figured I should not place it behind the voices of my interviewee because the interview did not take place at the site. So, I just put it behind myself.