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Re: lying with pixels



Cal Lee wrote:

> "Seeing is no longer believing. The image you see on the evening news
> could well be a fake―a fabrication of fast new video-manipulation
> technology."

  Hmm...old news.  Brady photographed a dead soldier form one side and called him Confederate and from the other side of the field and called him Union.   Hearst staged Pancho Villa's raids for film crews.  I have a lovely wedding portrait of my grandparents, done after he died  with faces from pictures from before they ever met.  Claudette Colbert always had her neck airbrushed in, and old Playboys airbrushed things out.  Hitler never did the two-step dance you see in clips, it was manipulated film.  Lange's "Migrant Mother", the most famous photo of the Depression, had the subject's thumb removed.  And who ever saw FDR in a wheelchair?  And of course the Edited OJ cover.
  "The camera never lies" only applies to wrinkles and blemishes (unless you have an airbrush).  Computers just do it a little better  (though I've yet to see believable computer animation...but maybe it's the Turing Test, and I wouldn't know sufficiently good animation).  But we're not as skeptical of images as of words; I suppose we've all manipulated the latter but not many the former.
  But a good justification for archiving originals!  I've seen a few of the undoctored Stalinist photos, so someone archived the originals somewhere.  

 PS- is Lawyerwannabes Inc the holding company for Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe (PSC)?

Susan Knoer
Reference Assistant
Special Collections
University of Louisville
Louisville, KY 40292
502/852-6752  
502/852-8734 FAX
susan.marie@louisville.edu

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