Imagery Policy

The Massachusetts Times · Published by The Massachusetts Times Company · massachusettstimes.us/policies/imagery · Effective October 16, 2026

Every image in our pages is a record or a rendering, as the Provenance Policy rules. This page is the craft law for both: what hands and tools may do to an image, what a caption owes, and the line no deadline moves. Every sentence here is kept today.

1. The Photograph as Record

1.1. A documentary photograph may receive the darkroom's honest trades: cropping, exposure and tone, color correction toward the scene as seen, dust removal, and sharpening within fidelity.

1.2. Nothing enters or leaves the frame after the shutter. No content is added, removed, moved, or composited; no subject is retouched into a better face or a cleaner street; and generative fill of any kind — expanding, patching, inventing pixels — is not an edit but a reclassification: the image becomes a rendering on the spot, and a rendering cannot wear a documentary caption.

1.3. Images are never flipped. A mirrored photograph is a small lie with a wedding ring on the wrong hand, and small lies are not a category this library recognizes.

2. The Crop That Lies

2.1. A crop may focus attention; it may never invert meaning. The crowd cropped to seem vast or vanished, the gesture cropped away from what provoked it — these are the imagery form of the misquotation our Citation and Quotation Terms condemn: the scene turned against its own meaning.

2.2. Where a tight frame could mislead on a material point, the work says what stood outside it or shows the wider frame.

3. Staging

3.1. Documentary images are found, not directed. We do not pose what we present as candid, and we do not re-enact what we present as the event — the Provenance Policy's boundary, kept at the craft level.

3.2. The honest portrait is honest precisely because portraiture announces itself. A set-up image serving as illustration is labeled a photo illustration, and the label travels as all class labels travel.

4. Captions

4.1. A caption is journalism: its who, what, where, and when are verified under the Verification Policy like any sentence in the body.

4.2. A true photograph under a false caption is a false record, and a caption error is corrected under the Correction Terms — a correction, never a silent tweak.

4.3. The caption states what the image is whenever its nature is not evident: handout, archival, portrait, photo illustration, rendering — the origin disclosure the Provenance Policy requires, placed where the eye already is.

5. Synthetic and Generated Imagery

5.1. The sealed line, in plain words: no synthetic or generated image publishes here as documentary witness. Ever. There is no exception process, no editor's override, and no emergency that creates one.

5.2. Generated and illustrative visuals serve honestly as labeled renderings — diagrams, charts, conceptual illustration — under the label law this library applies to every class.

5.3. Machine tools in photo processing are confined to Section 1.1's honest trades, as the Automation Policy's origin-neutral law requires: the tool does not change the rule, and the rule does not care about the tool.

6. Images From Others

6.1. A sourced image — handout, supplied, licensed, or found in public channels — is verified before it is used: its origin, its time, its place, tested with the forensic diligence the claim deserves. The internet is full of yesterday's fires wearing today's captions, and none of them run here.

6.2. Sourced images are credited under the Attribution Policy, licensed as the rights require — we license in with the same formality we license out — and labeled by origin, because a handout's interest travels inside its frame.

7. People in the Frame

7.1. Public life may be photographed in public: the street, the meeting, the game. That is photojournalism's lawful ground, and we stand on it without apology.

7.2. Restraint where restraint is law: children under the Coverage of Minors Policy, the dead under the Obituaries and the Dead Policy, booking photographs and victims under the Crime and Naming Policy. This page adds the craft; those pages own the lines.

8. We Keep the Negatives

8.1. The original capture is preserved as captured, as the Provenance Policy's chain requires. Every published derivative traces to its original.

8.2. A challenged image can therefore be audited: the published frame against the original bytes, the edit against Section 1's permissions. That audit is the answer this page gives to every accusation of manipulation — ours to run, and to stand behind in public under the Accountability Policy.

9. Failures

9.1. A mislabeled or misedited image is corrected in daylight under the Correction Terms, with the image's true class stated.

9.2. A counterfeit presented as capture is fabrication under the Integrity Policy, with its stated consequences, exactly as the Provenance Policy provides.

10. The Record of This Policy

10.1. This policy is kept in dated versions at its address, so the craft law behind any frame can always be checked against the frame's date.

This policy is one of the Policies this publication keeps.