Photos seen as fair game for humor, bad politics
fish
Registered Users Posts: 2,950 Major grins
By Katie Hafner
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE March 22, 2004
When John Knoll created Photoshop in 1989, he knew he was designing an image-editing program that could be used in good ways and bad.
Yet even Knoll, who wrote the software with his brother, Tom, was unprepared for how outlandish photo manipulation would become.
"When we worked on it, mostly we saw the possibilities, the cool things," said Knoll, 41. "Not how it would be abused."
The same tools that can be used to crop, retouch and otherwise edit digital images can be used just as easily to distort, alter and fabricate them.
With Photoshop and similar programs now widely available in inexpensive, easy-to-use consumer versions, just about anyone with rudimentary computer skills can cut, paste, erase, combine and retouch photographs. It doesn't take much skill to make the unreal seem real.
"Once this kind of technology was only available to people who could spend $1,000 on software," said Knoll, who currently works for Industrial Light & Magic, the special-effects company. "Now it's available to everyone, even those who want to use it for slander."
Playing with and circulating digital images has become something of a national pastime, the visual equivalent of e-mailed jokes.
Family photos are frequent fodder, and the Web teems with sight gags and fakes: a shark attacking a British Navy diver as he escapes up a ladder to a helicopter; northeastern North America in complete darkness after the August blackout; a "triple tornado" accompanying Hurricane Lili, which hit Louisiana in October 2002.
Yet not all digitally altered images are innocuous. A malicious one surfaced last month, when two photographs taken a year apart began circulating on the Web as one.
The composite, which carried a false Associated Press credit, purported to show John Kerry and Jane Fonda, known for her stance against the Vietnam War, sharing the speaker's platform at a 1971 anti-war rally.
Conservative groups circulated the manipulated photo for several days, and it appeared in several publications before it was revealed to be a fake, apparently stitched together by someone opposed to Kerry's presidential run.
An old trick
Faked photos are nothing new. Even with film and negatives, it was possible, with the right darkroom equipment and some skill and creativity, to remove people from images, for example, or to combine a jackrabbit and an antelope to create a gag "jackalope" postcard. Nor is photography for political purposes new. In 1840, Hippolyte Bayard, one of the earliest photographers, staged a picture of himself as a drowned man because he thought his work was not given proper recognition by the French government.
"But the scale of faking and manipulating is so much greater now in the environment of the pixel, which invites alteration," said Fred Ritchin, the author of "In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography" (Aperture, 1999).
Adobe Systems, which makes Photoshop, says there are about 5 million registered users of the various professional and consumer versions of its software, including Photoshop Elements 2.0, which costs $99.
Similar programs, such as Paint Shop Pro and Microsoft Digital Image Suite, are widely available. And many computers, digital cameras, scanners and printers now include free image-editing software.
Striking a chord
Many doctored photos are just funny, like the one of a man hoisting what appears to be a 90-pound cat.
David Mikkelson, who with his wife, Barbara, runs Snopes.com, an online repository and debunker of urban legends and hoaxes, including some composite photos, said fake images sometimes strike a chord because they reflect a certain reality.
"People are making caricatures based on existing conceptions," he said. "This helps them spread far and wide."
Such was the case with a manipulated photo that appeared on the Web in 2002, showing President Bush holding a book upside down during a visit with children in Houston.
The image was clearly meant to be funny. ("Even if it were real, it would still be just a funny picture," the Mikkelsons wrote on their site.)
Although it was quickly revealed to be a fake, the photo served to reinforce an existing viewpoint, as did an altered photo of Sen. Tom Daschle in which he salutes the flag with his left hand.
This point was apparently not lost on the creator of the Kerry-Fonda composite.
Especially during the presidential primaries, with scrutiny being given to Kerry's anti-war activities in the early 1970s, images such as the one showing him with Fonda can have a strong influence on the people who see them.
"What if that photo had floated around two days before the general election and there wasn't time to say it's not true?" said Ken Light, who took the original photograph of Kerry – which did not include Fonda – at an anti-war rally in 1971.
Light, 52, who teaches photojournalism and ethics at the University of California Berkeley, said he was surprised by the swiftness with which the doctoring occurred.
For 30 years, the original photo was buried in his files. He found it a month ago when he was going through old photos.
In view of Kerry's presidential bid, Light thought the photo might be of general interest and sent it to Corbis, the online stock-photo agency. A week later the composite surfaced.
"I was totally unprepared for what happened," he said.
Owen Franken, 57, a photographer in Paris who took the original photograph of Fonda in 1972, was so incensed by the fakery that he said he was "trying to figure out how to sue people about it."
Officials at Corbis, which sells licenses for both of the originals, are investigating the possibility of copyright violations.
Origins
Kenneth Irby, a visual-journalism group leader at the Poynter Institute, a journalism school in St. Petersburg, Fla., said he saw danger in the speed with which the Kerry-Fonda composite circulated on the Internet.
"It speaks to the level of sophistication that average citizens can have, placing something like that in the mainstream of legitimate reportage and information," he said.
Ted Sampley, who runs an anti-Kerry Web site, said he had been searching for months for a picture of Kerry with Fonda. After he posted an authentic one, which showed Kerry sitting several rows behind Fonda at a peace rally, Sampley said he received an e-mail message from a stranger containing the photo of the two side by side.
Sampley said he was skeptical not because the photo didn't look authentic, but because his own dogged search had not already unearthed it. That is, it seemed too good to be true.
"I wanted badly to put it up, but I wouldn't do it," he said.
So Sampley sent the photo to a handful of friends, soliciting their opinions on its authenticity. This helped propel the image around the Web.
"I inadvertently became a distributor," he said.
The doctoring of photographs in political settings is a practice of long standing. "Basically what (former Chairman) Mao did, eliminating people from photos, this is no different," Franken said.
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE March 22, 2004
When John Knoll created Photoshop in 1989, he knew he was designing an image-editing program that could be used in good ways and bad.
Yet even Knoll, who wrote the software with his brother, Tom, was unprepared for how outlandish photo manipulation would become.
"When we worked on it, mostly we saw the possibilities, the cool things," said Knoll, 41. "Not how it would be abused."
The same tools that can be used to crop, retouch and otherwise edit digital images can be used just as easily to distort, alter and fabricate them.
With Photoshop and similar programs now widely available in inexpensive, easy-to-use consumer versions, just about anyone with rudimentary computer skills can cut, paste, erase, combine and retouch photographs. It doesn't take much skill to make the unreal seem real.
"Once this kind of technology was only available to people who could spend $1,000 on software," said Knoll, who currently works for Industrial Light & Magic, the special-effects company. "Now it's available to everyone, even those who want to use it for slander."
Playing with and circulating digital images has become something of a national pastime, the visual equivalent of e-mailed jokes.
Family photos are frequent fodder, and the Web teems with sight gags and fakes: a shark attacking a British Navy diver as he escapes up a ladder to a helicopter; northeastern North America in complete darkness after the August blackout; a "triple tornado" accompanying Hurricane Lili, which hit Louisiana in October 2002.
Yet not all digitally altered images are innocuous. A malicious one surfaced last month, when two photographs taken a year apart began circulating on the Web as one.
The composite, which carried a false Associated Press credit, purported to show John Kerry and Jane Fonda, known for her stance against the Vietnam War, sharing the speaker's platform at a 1971 anti-war rally.
Conservative groups circulated the manipulated photo for several days, and it appeared in several publications before it was revealed to be a fake, apparently stitched together by someone opposed to Kerry's presidential run.
An old trick
Faked photos are nothing new. Even with film and negatives, it was possible, with the right darkroom equipment and some skill and creativity, to remove people from images, for example, or to combine a jackrabbit and an antelope to create a gag "jackalope" postcard. Nor is photography for political purposes new. In 1840, Hippolyte Bayard, one of the earliest photographers, staged a picture of himself as a drowned man because he thought his work was not given proper recognition by the French government.
"But the scale of faking and manipulating is so much greater now in the environment of the pixel, which invites alteration," said Fred Ritchin, the author of "In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography" (Aperture, 1999).
Adobe Systems, which makes Photoshop, says there are about 5 million registered users of the various professional and consumer versions of its software, including Photoshop Elements 2.0, which costs $99.
Similar programs, such as Paint Shop Pro and Microsoft Digital Image Suite, are widely available. And many computers, digital cameras, scanners and printers now include free image-editing software.
Striking a chord
Many doctored photos are just funny, like the one of a man hoisting what appears to be a 90-pound cat.
David Mikkelson, who with his wife, Barbara, runs Snopes.com, an online repository and debunker of urban legends and hoaxes, including some composite photos, said fake images sometimes strike a chord because they reflect a certain reality.
"People are making caricatures based on existing conceptions," he said. "This helps them spread far and wide."
Such was the case with a manipulated photo that appeared on the Web in 2002, showing President Bush holding a book upside down during a visit with children in Houston.
The image was clearly meant to be funny. ("Even if it were real, it would still be just a funny picture," the Mikkelsons wrote on their site.)
Although it was quickly revealed to be a fake, the photo served to reinforce an existing viewpoint, as did an altered photo of Sen. Tom Daschle in which he salutes the flag with his left hand.
This point was apparently not lost on the creator of the Kerry-Fonda composite.
Especially during the presidential primaries, with scrutiny being given to Kerry's anti-war activities in the early 1970s, images such as the one showing him with Fonda can have a strong influence on the people who see them.
"What if that photo had floated around two days before the general election and there wasn't time to say it's not true?" said Ken Light, who took the original photograph of Kerry – which did not include Fonda – at an anti-war rally in 1971.
Light, 52, who teaches photojournalism and ethics at the University of California Berkeley, said he was surprised by the swiftness with which the doctoring occurred.
For 30 years, the original photo was buried in his files. He found it a month ago when he was going through old photos.
In view of Kerry's presidential bid, Light thought the photo might be of general interest and sent it to Corbis, the online stock-photo agency. A week later the composite surfaced.
"I was totally unprepared for what happened," he said.
Owen Franken, 57, a photographer in Paris who took the original photograph of Fonda in 1972, was so incensed by the fakery that he said he was "trying to figure out how to sue people about it."
Officials at Corbis, which sells licenses for both of the originals, are investigating the possibility of copyright violations.
Origins
Kenneth Irby, a visual-journalism group leader at the Poynter Institute, a journalism school in St. Petersburg, Fla., said he saw danger in the speed with which the Kerry-Fonda composite circulated on the Internet.
"It speaks to the level of sophistication that average citizens can have, placing something like that in the mainstream of legitimate reportage and information," he said.
Ted Sampley, who runs an anti-Kerry Web site, said he had been searching for months for a picture of Kerry with Fonda. After he posted an authentic one, which showed Kerry sitting several rows behind Fonda at a peace rally, Sampley said he received an e-mail message from a stranger containing the photo of the two side by side.
Sampley said he was skeptical not because the photo didn't look authentic, but because his own dogged search had not already unearthed it. That is, it seemed too good to be true.
"I wanted badly to put it up, but I wouldn't do it," he said.
So Sampley sent the photo to a handful of friends, soliciting their opinions on its authenticity. This helped propel the image around the Web.
"I inadvertently became a distributor," he said.
The doctoring of photographs in political settings is a practice of long standing. "Basically what (former Chairman) Mao did, eliminating people from photos, this is no different," Franken said.
"Consulting the rules of composition before taking a photograph, is like consulting the laws of gravity before going for a walk." - Edward Weston
"The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over."-Hunter S.Thompson
"The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over."-Hunter S.Thompson
0
Comments
here it is