Phun with phakes…
Ken Light talks about his photograph of John Kerry and how easy it is in the digital age to lie with images. President Bush was the victim of a similar lie: a photo showing him reading a children’s book upside down. Light says:
It’s not that photographic imagery was ever unquestionable in its veracity; as long as pictures have been made from photographic film, people have known how to alter images by cropping. But what I’ve been trying to teach my students about how easy and professional-looking these distortions of truth have become in the age of Photoshop — and how harmful the results can be — had never hit me so personally as the day I found out somebody had pulled my Kerry picture off my agency’s Web site, stuck Fonda at his side, and then used the massive, unedited reach of the Internet to distribute it all over the world.
Such shenaigans are nothing new to political campaigns and propaganda efforts. What’s frightening, however, is how easy it is to fake such images today and how realistic those fakes look.
A rhetor might attempt to link Jane Fonda and John Kerry as like-minded anti-war protesters for the pathetic purpose of fomenting derision in the citizenry. And this would be a legitimate rhetorical purpose open to challenge and debate.
But we think of photographs as framed moments of reality. We think of photographs as corresponding to reality in a direct way similar to the connection of our own sense of sight (although this is not the case). We see it happen. We see a picture. The latter seems only slighting removed from the former.
Rhetors may lie, or willfully misinterpret facts, or deal in innuendo. Such statements may be checked. Faked photographs may be checked, too. But I would assert that such lying is worse by degree because it attempts to disconnect our sense of sight from its seemingly direct relationship to experience.
Snopes.com shows you how it was done.
I stopped thinking of photographs as “framed moments of reality” about 20 years ago when I discovered that some of the famous Brady Civil War battlefield photos had been staged.
I did a lot of research on Brady as an undergraduate at RIT. Fascinating stuff. He’s actually in many of the photographs! And he insisted on putting his own name on the pictures made by those who worked for him. While Brady was active throughout the war, he took far fewer chances on the battlefield following the first battle of Bull Run, in which he became lost trying to flee the advancing Confederates.
As a long time avid history reader, I am familiar with your Brady facts – he was the prototype for celebrity photographers like Annie Leibovitz, Franciso Scavullo, Andy Warhol, David Bailey and Richard Avedon. Speaking of Bull Run (weren’t we?) one of the fascinating things about the first Bull Run was that Washingtonians pranced out to the battlefield in their carriages with picnic baskets to observe the carnage. “Some say” we’re calloused toward violence, but somehow, I can’t see Rummy setting out his picnic basket at the outskirts of Baghdad. One more thing,I hate to expose my ignorance (yeah, right!) but what is RIT?
Rochester Institute of Technology. I have an AAS in Photography.