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Beyond Photoshop - Playing Mind Games With News Photos

August 12th, 2008 at 7:24 am · DrHGuy · Fascinations · No Comments

This Is Not A Fake Photo1

Entry in Boing Boing’s “Iran: You Suck at Photoshop” contest.
(boingboing.net, submitted by THEBLUEONE)


Seeing Is Believing - And That Is The Problem

In Photography as a Weapon,2 Errol Morris3 offers a thoughtful, provocative, and accessible take on manipulations of photographs, ranging from the subtle (e.g., cropping choices and adjustments in contrast) to some so crudely done that they appear intentionally obvious, to influence the public or a group of decision-makers.

The focus of the discussion is summarized in this excerpt:

As almost everyone knows by now, various major daily newspaper published, on July 10, a photograph of four Iranian missiles streaking heavenward; then Little Green Footballs (significantly, a blog and not a daily newspaper) provided evidence that the photograph had been faked. Later, many of those same papers published a Whitman’s sampler of retractions and apologies. For me it raised a series of questions about images. Do they provide illustration of a text or an idea of evidence of some underlying reality or both? And if they are evidence, don’t we have to know that the evidence is reliable, that it can be trusted?



Questions raised include

  • Do retractions and apologies for running intentionally or unintentionally misleading photos resolve the problem?
  • Are photo-fakes presented even though they are likely to be discovered in order to draw attention to an issue?
  • To what extent does text influence the reader’s perception of a photo, e.g., do different captions of the same photo automatically change how the reader interprets that photo?


    • This image adapted from graphics used in the original blog

  • How willing are we, as readers, to continue believing the implications of a photo discovered to have been altered and is that belief a matter of conscious choice or a matter of the sequential firing of neural pathways?



It’s a fascinating read that should raise our level of vigilance about what is presented to us and shake our confidence in our capacities to distinguish real from not-real.



Footnotes

_____________________
  1. My heading, “This Is Not A Fake Photo,” is, of course, a snarky, self-satisfied allusion to La trahison des images (The Treachery of Images), Magritte’s snarky, self-satisfied painting which includes the inscription, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe). The painting spotlights the issue of reality Vs representation, which is, in my view, also the conceptual basis underlying the discussion of real Vs fake photos featured in this post.

    I need hardly point out to the astute reader that the above graphic is not Magritte’s La trahison des images.↩

  2. Photography as a Weapon was published in the 11 August 2008 New York Times Opinion blogs↩
  3. Errol Morris is described in the Times sidebar as “a documentary filmmaker whose movie The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2004. He also directed Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line, Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control and A Brief History of Time, among other films.”↩

Tags: Fascinations