Wrap on Adnan Hajj

In an earlier post concerning the flap at Reuter's over photographer/artist Adnan Hajj, I said that most likely the smokin' Beirut photograph was submitted by mistake.

Hajj's rationale for the photo alterations, that he was trying to remove dust from the image, just doesn't seem plausible. You don't paste in scads of cloned smoke blobs to remove dust, nor do you clone extra buildings. My initial judgment, in other words, was apparently wrong.

One thing I noted that I haven't seen posted elsewhere is the way in which the cloned buildings align suggests that the smoke plume is intentionally doubled.
At the lower left corner of the photo, the buildings that are most easily identified as occuring more than once are reproduced along the same line as the plume of smoke. There are three fairly distinct elements that are reproduced in perfect parallel to the plume of smoke. I'm suggesting that the entire section was copied and then superimposed up and to the right to give the plume a thicker appearance.
Just the sort of thing that could help reduce the effects of dust on the lens!

I don't currently have a program that allows me to insert helpful illustratory lines.

Anyway, that's a wrap on Hajj. He's been fired, and all of his past photos are sure to receive close scrutiny from the blogosphere.


Additional Note:
One last piece of evidence in favor of the superimposition of a large portion of the photo: Note the horizon line to the left of the smoke plume. It's higher than the horizon line to the right side of the page.
I reviewed the Left & Right site for comparison. In the original, the horizon line is approximately the same height from one end of the image to the other, and the smoke plume is noticeably elongated in the version treated (according to Hajj) for dust compared to the original. As noted above, Hajj thickened the smoke (and lengthened the plume) by superimposing the the same image over itself, displaced enough to provide the extra length to the plume.

Update: I decided to import the original from Left and Right to assist in the immediate comparison of the horizon line and the height of the smoke column.