If photojournalism had a Mount Rushmore, Steve McCurry would be on it. He's probably the closest thing to a mainstream celebrity in the field, because you can have this conversation:

"Hey, have you heard of Steve McCurry?"

"I don't think so."

"He's the National Geographic photographer who shot that 'Afghan Girl' cover."

"Oh! Him. I've seen that."

The image depicts then-17-year-old Sharbat Gula, who McCurry encountered in a refugee camp in Afghanistan in 1984 during the Soviet Union's invasion of the country. Hers is easily the most recognizable image to have ever run on the cover of National Geographic. And McCurry's photo is arguably the most famous ever taken by a news photographer.

But the shot is far from an anomaly in McCurry's archives. In the more than three decades since he launched a career shooting war and conflict in central Asia, his sister Bonnie McCurry V'Soske (who also runs his studio) estimates he's shot more than a million news and travel photos. He's among the most-awarded photojournalists of all time, and a member of the elite Magnum Photos collective.

And it turns out he — or someone who works for him — faked the content of some of his photos.

The resulting scandal has sparked hot debate on the corners of the internet where people care deeply about photo ethics. But the implications are wider.

Photos are immensely important to how we understand ourselves and the world around us. Now that a huge proportion of humanity carries powerful, internet-connected cameras in their pockets, we're collectively shooting over a trillion photographs each year. The result is a kind of species-wide visual diary.

At the same time, it's easier than ever to manipulate these photos we create — and there's massive demand to do so, as evidenced by the increasingly sophisticated processing tools built right in to Instagram's sharing app. So, even as we create this massive visual document of our world, the line between its truth and fiction grows blurrier.

McCurry, with his rare combination of 1.4 million Instagram followers and journalistic prestige, wields outsized influence over the what counts as reality on the internet.

His followers and fans come to his work for its brilliant colors and unfamiliar subjects, and receive it — emerging as it does from the camera of a famous photojournalist — as representing something honest about places they've never been. If McCurry is willing to alter the contents of those photos, it sets a new, potentially laxer standard for honesty. And it's one that makes other photographers and journalists nervous.

How the controversy unfolded

McCurry's troubles began at a gallery show in Italy.

An Italian photographer in attendance, Paolo Viglione, noticed something odd in an image McCurry shot in Cuba.

The bottom half of a man's leg fades into the steps behind it. A yellow gradient emerges where his foot should be — clearly transposed from an adjacent sign. It appears to be the result of a shoddy attempt to move overlapping objects around in the shot.

Here's the relevant part of the photo, blown up to offer a closer look:

Viglione posted about what he'd seen on his blog (site in Italian) on April 29. His tone was winking and casual, pleased with the joke of catching a famous photographer in an error. It's clearly intended as ribbing from a fan, not a take-down.

But his light nudge set off a chain of explosions. PetaPixel, a popular site for photography enthusiasts, published an article based on Viglione's blog post that has since been shared more than 23,000 times.

We couldn't reach McCurry for comment because, according to V'Soske (his sister and president of his studio), he's traveling in an undisclosed part of the continent Africa, and is not reachable. (McCurry is the rare person for whom this is in fact a plausible excuse.)

However, he did provide a statement to PetaPixel. We've added bolding to emphasize the relevant parts:

My career started almost forty years ago when I left home to travel and photograph throughout South Asia. I went into Afghanistan with a group of Mujaheddin in 1979, and thus became a photojournalist when news magazines and newspapers picked up my pictures, published them around the world, and gave me assignments to provide more images of the war.

Later on, I covered other wars and civil conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere, and produced photo essays for magazines, but like other artists, my career has gone through many stages.

Today I would define my work as visual storytelling, because the pictures have been shot in many places, for many reasons, and in many situations. Much of my recent work has been shot for my own enjoyment in places I wanted to visit to satisfy my curiosity about the people and the culture. For example, my Cuba work was taken during four personal trips.

My photography is my art, and it’s gratifying when people enjoy and appreciate it. I have been fortunate to be able to share my work with people around the world.

I try to be as involved as much as I can in reviewing and supervising the printing of my work, but many times the prints are printed and shipped when I am away. That is what happened in this case. It goes without saying that what happened with this image was a mistake for which I have to take responsibility.

I have taken steps to change procedures at my studio which will prevent something like this from happening again.

In other words, McCurry argues that his recent work is of a more personal nature, and shouldn't be understood in the context of photojournalism — but also that he was not aware of the alteration, and that it would not happen again.

PetaPixel discovered further examples of alterations with readers' help.

A child was removed from the background of this photo between its appearance on McCurry's blog and on his website:

And a Facebook user showed how a man cheesing for the camera was removed from this shot:

McCurry has not yet responded to these examples.

So what should we think about all of this?

We reached out to some visual journalists to get their perspectives.

Candice Cusic is a photojournalist who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize as a part of a reporting team at the Chicago Tribune in 2000. Craig Duff worked at The New York Times and CNN as a video journalist, before directing multimedia content for Time Magazine. Both now lecture on visual journalism and its ethics at Northwestern University. (Full disclosure: the author studied with both as a college student.)

Cusic said the core problem with McCurry's alterations is that they privilege an abstract idea of aesthetic perfection over the realities of the places he represents in his work.

"I hate [the idea of] any photographer trying to be perfect," she said. "I think it's lying."

She points toward the generations of photojournalists who may have been inspired toward their career's by McCurry's work. She says his too-perfect photos set a bad example. It's hard to tell the truth in photos she said, but, "to be perfect, well, anyone can Photoshop."

Duff took a less harsh stance on McCurry, but said photojournalism has to be strict about its rules:

"In journalism, no matter what the medium, whether it’s text or photos or graphics, we’re always trying to mitigate the manipulations that we do just by observing: what words we choose, what angle we choose," he said. "Because at every single step of the way you’re making decisions that are representing reality in a particular way. So there’s no such thing as an objective photograph — wherever you put your body to capture an image you’re making decisions about all these different things. We’re trying to mitigate the effect of all those decisions to make sure we’re being as honest as possible."

In the Photoshop era, a number of incidents have given visual journalists reason to police the rules of their profession. In 2003, the photographer Brian Walski turned in a faked image that ended up running on the cover of the Los Angeles Times:

He was fired soon after the fake was discovered. Similarly, Reuters cut ties with freelance photographer Adnan Hajj after he added smoke to an image of an Israeli airstrike on Lebanon. A World Press Photo award-winning photographer lost his prize for staging a shot. Another was accused of dishonest editing, but eventually cleared.

All that adds up to an environment where photojournalists are understandably jumpy at the creeping threat of fakery. While many apply some minor stylistic toning to their shots, altering the substance of photos is an important taboo.

In an email to Tech Insider, V'Soske defended her brother from the accusation that he belongs in the same category as Walksi and Hajj. The bolding here is hers:

Steve is not a photojournalist. Not anymore. He hasn't been in that world for many years. Yes, he risked his life over and over again in war and conflict zones, but he is now 66 years old. Did he not have the right to transition to other forms of photography as the years went by? Just because people want to place Steve in the "photojournalism box" doesn't mean that is where he is today. His body of work is impossible to pin down to one easy-to-understand category. He, like many of his colleagues, occasionally accepts assignments from corporations and advertising companies when opportunities arise. Is anyone really so naive that they believe that after all these years he is still doing only editorial work? Did he need to make an announcement? ... Does anyone begrudge him the freedom to do what he wants with pictures which have nothing to do with an assignment or a commission?

She goes on to point out that other famous photographers from McCurry's prestigious Magnum collective liked to heavily tone their images in the darkroom, and alleges — without getting specific — that others don't hold to "pure" photojournalistic standards.

"The interesting thing to me observing this whole situation, is the glee and excitement some seem to have while taking someone down," she added. "I suppose it's human nature, but I just find it sad."

So how far is a photojournalist allowed to go in their personal work?

Cusic, who now shoots primarily as a wedding photographer, said she still holds herself to the same rules as when she was a full-time journalist.

"I could probably be a much better photographer, and win more awards [if I altered photos]," she said. "But as a photojournalism educator for more than 10 years it's not something I'd ever do."

Duff said the idea that a photojournalist can create work outside photojournalism holds water — up to a point.

"A lot of photographers will do corporate work that’s separate from their photojournalism. But if your name is as a photojournalist, and your brand is as a photojournalist, then it becomes a little more about ‘Are you playing by the same rules?’" he said.

"It is true that if you’re doing simple travel photographs and you’re making pieces of art then it’s a completely different set of rules. But if you are known as something, and you do that, then people are going to be suspicious about how that creeps in to your photojournalism work. And that seems to be the case here."

Did McCurry deserve his status in the first place?

A McCurry shot for a Valentino ad campaign Screenshot/Valentino

Concerns about McCurry's image manipulations have amplified another complaint: That his photos are exploitative and represent a false, exotic vision of non-Western cultures for a Western audience.

Writing presciently for the New York Times just before this scandal broke, the critic Teju Cole said of McCurry's images:

The subject looks directly at the camera, wide-eyed and usually marked by some peculiar­ity, like pale irises, face paint or a snake around the neck. And when he shoots a wider scene, the result feels like a certain ideal of photography: the rule of thirds, a neat counterpoise of foreground and background and an obvious point of primary interest, placed just so. Here’s an old-timer with a dyed beard. Here’s a doe-eyed child in a head scarf. The pictures are staged or shot to look as if they were. They are astonishingly boring ...

The problem is that the uniqueness of any given country is a mixture not only of its indigenous practices and borrowed customs but also of its past and its present. Any given photograph encloses only a section of the world within its borders. A sequence of photographs, taken over many years and carefully arranged, however, reveals a worldview. To consider a place largely from the perspective of a permanent anthropological past, to settle on a notion of authenticity that edits out the present day, is not simply to present an alternative truth: It is to indulge in fantasy.

As news of Photoshopped McCurry prints came to light, Paroma Mukherjee wrote an essay for the Indian website The Wire that takes an even stronger tone:

McCurry’s questionable ethic draws on subjects who seem happy (perhaps) to be photographed by a foreign tourist who wants to build on a fetish of the underdeveloped world and its supposed charms. Street children, rickshaw pullers, village women in saris – you name it, he had them covered. And not in a manner that expressed any visual interest in their history or ethnography, but more their “value” to the Western world. This value returned to India in the late ’90s, in the form of agency (Reuters, AP, Bloomberg etc.) photography templates. The agencies fed on the fetish, building up a prejudiced and misplaced account of contemporary India.

Duff has a somewhat more forgiving take on this point.

"I think that’s fine to have that conversation," he said. "I think we all have to be conscious that as we do work in other cultures, to try to not go in with preconceived notions, or stereotypes, in the work that we do. But I think to say that someone can’t look at an India that is not downtown Mumbai, and can't shoot things that are interesting or quaint, is wrong."

He points to the photographer Danny Wilcox Frazier, who makes images of a rural America that would be unfamiliar to residents of New York City or Chicago.

Here's what this means for the rest of us

I imagine that the vast majority of people who read this article have uploaded images to the internet at some point. Many too consume work from favorite Instagrammers, Humans of New York, and other photographers who blur the lines between artist and journalist. Anyone with a smartphone camera has the power to turn a scuffle on a streetcorner into an important national news story — or a fake cake photo into a major lawsuit.

Cusic said, "I bet a lot of people are shocked that what he [McCurry] did isn't allowed."

As more people perform acts of photojournalism, the ethics grow fuzzier. And when a photographer as well-regarded as McCurry gets swept into a fight over his responsibilities to the truth, it only becomes harder for the rest of us to know where we stand.

Writing for PetaPixel, Allen Murabayashi says:

McCurry has an audience. Afghan Girl is so ingrained in popular memory that I’ve seen it used multiple times as a Halloween costume. I can’t think of another photo that has reached that threshold. Castigating him for having the imperialist eye of a white male? Totally valid, but remember he’s a 66 year old white male from Darby, PA who helped define the very genre he’s criticized of shooting within. This is akin to criticizing Bruce Springsteen for having an 80s rock sound ...

But unless you were planning on buying a $3,000 fine art print, your opinion is unlikely to affect his reputation among his fans. And given the fashion industry’s support of Terry Richardson, it’s unlikely that a Photoshop bug will cause his economic ruin.

History will be the ultimate judge of McCurry’s work. Perhaps his work will be viewed a level of skepticism and uncertainty that dogs photographers like Weegee, Robert Capa, Joe Rosenthal, et al. But I suspect the public will simply remember an iconic image of an Afghan girl taken in golden era of National Geographic, which was synonymous with “great photography” for a generation of Americans.

So does it matter if McCurry faked his shots? Does it make them less honest — or his early photojournalism less valid?

That's up to each of his viewers to decide for themselves.