Yesterday afternoon, Michelle Malkin and Charles Johnson reported more or less simultaneously on a curious image (since removed) from the front page of the DNC website, purporting to show a U.S. soldier “hurting” because of “GOP broken promises.” To wit:
Only problem: The pictured soldier is actually Canadian, and Johnson’s readers quickly located more stills, providing conclusive evidence that a Democratic Photoshopper had doctored the image to remove a medal evidently believed to be a dead giveaway (but embarrassingly leaving another — the funny lapel pin).
This phenomenon is common enough now that such images have come to merit their own word: Fauxtoshop. In November 2005, MoveOn.org ran a TV spot conservative bloggers found politically outrageous, and which luckily happened to be an example of this burgeoning trend. Much like this latest imbroglio, the uniforms of foreign troops (this time, British) were modified to look more American:
In both cases, one wonders just how hard it would be to find a genuine photograph of members of the U.S. armed services looking vaguely aggrieved or lining up for a plateful of slop. The circumstances were slightly different in one of the earliest instances of blog-era political fauxtoshoppery, an image from the front page of the Bush-Cheney ‘04 official website, offending sections encircled by an unidentified Kossack:
Here, the idea was to make it look a lot cooler, as if this wall of troops just went on forever. Just as their counterparts on the right saw leftist perfidy in later fauxtoshop jobs, this manipulation was seized upon by the nascent netroots as another strike against A”W”OL.
But what should we make of all this? Be assured, neither side is above manipulating images of American troops for political expediency. These incidents say a lot less about comparative patriotism than than about the primacy of images in propaganda. Good visuals are hard to come by, and if a deceptive visual is more striking than a real image, unfortunately, that’s considered good enough.
P.S. There is also, of course, the recent case of photo manipulation by Lebanese Reuters photographer Adnan Hajj, also brought to light at Little Green Footballs:
While it falls beyond U.S. partisan considerations and does not involve soldiers per se, it is also probably the biggest Photoshop fraud uncovered by those pesky bloggers, and certainly deserves mention here.
P.P.S. Any journalism professor worth his whiskey makes sure freshman communications students hear about the distortive power of photographs. Already in the curriculum, I’m sure, is the recent case of an ambiguous photograph by Thomas Hoepker of young Brooklynites observing South Manhattan on Sept. 11, which has been the recent subject of debate at Slate:
Unlike the military-themed images above, this photo underwent no changes. When it’s hard enough to tell what undoctored images mean, one might hope that propagandists would use images in their proper contexts — but one might be hoping for an awful long time.
I think your title is proven exactly wrong by the body of your post… Photoshopping an image to convey what the Graphic Artist wants to get across is shown to be much easier than PhotoGRAPHING that image in the first place.
Your title should have been “Photoshop: Still Easier Than Photography”
The “funny lapel pin” is actually a poppy; worn in Canada for Remembrance Day on November 11, commemorating the end of World War I. So it was an immediate giveaway that he wasn’t in the U.S. military.
Mr. Michael: It is because the perfect photograph is so elusive that campaign art departments turn to Photoshop. You are right, it is certainly easier to use Photoshop — but even that is easier to catch than said art departments seem to think.
Scrat: Thanks for the detail.
From what I remember, in the Whatever It Takes photoshopped image, there was something in the foreground obstructing the view of the troops, so while the troops in the background were indeed photoshopped in, there were troops filling the seats none the less.
If you are interested in photoshopping, you can pick up Photoshop Elements 4.0 from Adobe relatively cheaply and try it yourself. See what can be done at Lundesigns.com
Charles of LGF updated his post on the DNC page to say that it the photoshopping was done by the original photojournalist for some sort of copyright reasons. Dems didn’t change the picture, although they did foolishly run it in the first place. For what it’s worth.
As someone who has dabbled with photoshop, many of the images that were easily caught were not done very well. If a photo is carefully planned and doctored it is a lot more difficult to detect. So you can imagine that these carelessly presented images are only the tip of the iceberg. I keep telling my friends that the giant iceberg who’s submerged section is visible, the giant cats and other animals, the great white shark going after the diver on the helicopter - these are all fakes. Yet so many are taken in completely by them. Photo trickery has been with us pretty much as long as photographs have been around.
Reading back through the thread, I can’t believe I didn’t notice the poppy immediately. Too late, I provide this: a Commonwealth tradition, inspired by a Canadian poet, hosted here on an American website. (One that should give the align=center a rest, incidentally.)
You are right, the poppy pin is a dead give away.
It is amazing how a photographer for a renowned company like Reuters thinks he can get away with manipulating images trying to cheat the general public.
It is a dangerous practice, as it could lead to all sorts of reactions. Lets just hope no one will get hurt from these low practices