The History of Lying With Images 72
An article at The Verge discusses a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art which traces the history of photo manipulation, starting in the mid-1800s. Early photographers used simple techniques like painting on their negatives or simply forming a composite image from many painstakingly framed shots. That period of time even had its own approximation of modern memes: "A large number of prints from that era — featuring decapitated subjects holding, juggling, or otherwise posing with their own heads — might be seen as the lolcats of their day, owing to an alluringly macabre and widespread fascination with parlour tricks and stage magic." However, lying with pictures really took off when business and government figured out how effective it could be as a tool for propaganda. The exhibit has many examples, such as President Ulysses S. Grant's head superimposed onto a soldier's body and a different background, or another of Joseph Goebbels removed from a photo of a party. The article likens these manipulations to more recent situations like the faked pictures of Osama Bin Laden's corpse, and often-hilarious altered ads featured on Photoshop Disasters. The article ends with a quote from photographer Jerry Uelsmann: "Let us not delude ourselves by the seemingly scientific nature of the darkroom ritual. It has been and always will be a form of alchemy."
The Late Scott Mutter's Photomontages Ruled! (Score:5, Interesting)
Scott Mutter: A More Perfect World [photographymuseum.com]. Before there was Photoshop, there was Scott Mutter's Surrational World [iwantcrayons.com]!
Re:Nothing new (Score:0, Interesting)
Just a footnote in the history of lying^w mankind.
Yeah like when we pretend IQ tests are "culturally biased" only when we discover that blacks tend to do poorly. Until then the tests were great. White people who did badly were just flunkies. But no, not blacks, when it comes to them our worldview will only admit a few specific not-their-own-fault reasons why they do poorly. Same way the Catholic Church refused to look through Galileo's telescope, because they know what he said "just ain't so" and must be a trick. After all, everybody knows the heavenly bodies like planets are always perfect spheres without crater or blemish. Everybody knows, of course, that blacks are every bit as intellectually able. No matter what, NO MATTER WHAT, it cannot be that they think being a thug is more important than getting an education, nosirree, we cannot start thinking that this is a choice they make and that choices have consequences, noooo way, that would make you a bad person.
How to tell you are a shallow small minded emotional bed-wetting liberal? You think I am talking about a race and not about choices people make that others, who worry about race, read things into that are not there.
The standard of lying (Score:0, Interesting)
is still Soviet Russia.
http://englishrussia.com/2012/04/30/photoshop-of-the-soviet-time/