It’s a dramatic picture, right? The photographer caught a scene where a young man obviously got into an altercation, where fists fly, where he is getting hurt. The picture shows the moment of impact, the moment the drama unfolds. And the photographer kept his cool. He identified the scene, he shot and kept shooting although the scene around him was heated and he was at risk of being harmed himself.

We admire the photographer. He did his best to capture a scene of great drama. But maybe we should not admire the photographer but criticise him, maybe even despise him and ask if he lost all human compassion at a moment where he should have put his camera aside and should have tried to save the young man from being harmed. Hasn’t he exploited the scene and the young man instead of trying to stop it and to save the victim?

And now I am telling you what happened around this scene and how the picture was shot.

It was New Years Eve night in the party quarter of Wellington, New Zealand. People there were in a good mood, many of them had had more than just a couple of drinks. So had this young man. To be clear - he was completely drunk. And in his drunken mind he had tripped over and bent his ankle. He was in severe pain sitting on the ground after the fall and after injuring his leg. His friends, equally drunk, were standing around him and making jokes about his mishap. And then the photographer arrived. The group of friends saw the photographer raising his camera and they started playing a game. They faked a brawl, clenched their fists and did as if they were hitting him. It was a big commotion of laughing and shouting and people making jokes. Only the drunken and injured young man in the middle did not become aware of the scene around him. He was all pain, he felt all alone.

I edited the picture in a way that I minimised the visual impact of the whole surrounding scene. I darkened the background and the legs of the group of friends, I blurred out a cell phone that was held in the background and that could have visually distracted from the scene. I wanted to achieve that the viewer is focussing on the perceived drama only.

This picture is a brilliant example of how it is possible to remove a picture from its context and how to falsify reality. It would have been dead easy to sell this picture as showing a highly dramatic scene when in reality it was a simple drunken mishap and some friends making a big joke out of that.

So what is reality in photography? What do we show? What can we believe?