Entries Tagged 'fauxtography' ↓

John Bolton accuses her of having ceded to Hezbollah under the pressure of its fauxtography campaign.

[T]he main reason for America’s retreat from its initial position was U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who “changed her mind fundamentally” after an Israeli aerial assault killed 28 civilians in Kana on July 30. “Rice exerted enormous
pressure on me to reach an agreement already,” he said. “Until Kana, the U.S. wasn’t interested in another typical Middle Eastern cease-fire. We thought we would exploit the fighting to fundamentally change the situation, especially in Lebanon and Syria. But under the influence of her shock over Kana, the secretary of state changed her mind and only wanted an immediate end to the fire. That was the policy Rice dictated.”

She wanted to get the pictures off the TV screens, regardless of the cost. What an incompetent dolt.

 I decried the lack of attention to fauxtography here.

I suppose we’re going to have to have a lot more experience with this new weapon in asymmetrical warfare before we get secretaries of state who stick to their guns rather than cave in to demented neanderthals like Nasrallah.

Carlos Edde, head of the National Bloc party which is part of the March 14 Forces in Lebanon, has criticized Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah for announcing that his organization was holding body parts of Israeli soldiers.

Edde said: “I never imagined that a Lebanese political leader… would shout before hundreds of children and before television cameras that he has body parts and is proud of it. The worst thing is his joy in trading in these body parts.”

Secretary Rice’s legacy:

“Your army left behind the remains of soldiers in our villages and fields,” Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said, addressing the Israeli people during a speech to tens of thousands of Shiites taking part in commemorations marking Ashura.

“They [Israeli army] were so weak on the field that they left behind remains not of one, two or three but a large number of your soldiers,” Nasrallah added.

“One body is almost complete,” Nasrallah said. “What did the [Israeli] army say to the family of these soldiers and what remains did they give them?”

The Hizbullah leader’s comments sparked outrage in Israel, which prides itself on doing everything to recover the remains of its soldiers from fields of battle and has in the past freed prisoners in exchange for remains of soldiers and civilians.

And now some Israelis are calling for his assassination. I’m sure that Secretary Rice—who finds it so inconvenient to hold Israel’s enemies accountable for their destructive behavior—will find some way to condemn the “cycle of violence.”

The NYT’s Virginia Heffernan once came close to understanding (though she didn’t use these words) that one category of infotainment—in this case, celebrity photography—isn’t all bad.

Jennifer Aniston looking pensive occasioned a headline on her misery since her divorce from Brad Pitt. The caption drew me to Ms. Aniston’s eyes. Interesting: those part-Greek eyes, darkened by experience. What was Ms. Aniston thinking, now that she’d been left for Mr. Pitt’s costar in an action movie, the tattooed siren Angelina Jolie? So human, her hurt and expression. And so recent, I thought. I bought the magazine. …

Nevertheless, Heffernan proclaimed her guilt about indulging in what she considered a lowly pastime: gawking at celebrities.

Weakly I have hoped reading portraits in this way might strengthen some evolutionary skill, the way gossiping is said to make you better at forging allegiances.

I wouldn’t want to get all meta or postmodernist on her, but in fact Heffernan is strengthening certain skills. Media savviness may be the quintessential skill of our era. The people enjoying its advantages, if indeed they are advantages, are those who learn to manipulate the media the better to please audiences. Surely this cannot come as a surprise to Heffernan.

I also find it curious that Heffernan continues to flog her own guilt over her terminal lowbrow-ness while Perez Hilton, “the reigning online gossip maven,” one of Heffernan’s interview subjects, explains exactly how, as a practitioner, he ensnares her in the guilt trap [e.a.]:

“I took several art history classes in school, and photography,” he said in a telephone interview. “When you pay attention, you see some things that somebody else might miss, so it behooves you to try and find that special thing in an image. Then your intepretation will stand out more.”

He recognizes too that analyzing a photograph also often means embellishing it: “When I look at a picture, I go through the same process as when I look at a news story. How can I process this image to make this as entertaining as possible to my readers? I’m looking at it, cropping it, resizing it, drawing on it, making it my own.”

Despite even this acknowledgment that the photographs are shrewdly manipulated in order tap into exactly that place where Heffernan responds to the endeavor as deep play, Heffernan continues to feel guilty about her secret—until she meets another high-minded person like herself slumming at a certain online site:

[L]ast summer … I spoke to a lawyer I met on a “Lonelygirl15” message board. He and I were both obsessed with figuring out whether she was an actress or an ordinary girl.

“What do you do with your time when you’re not studying Web images?” I asked him in an e-mail message.

“I usually stick to stuff like Rathergate or the doctored Reuters photographs,” he wrote back, …“But this is fascinating.”

And that’s when it occurred to me: there is an undeniable pleasure in inferring stories from pieces of data, whether the story is trivial — “Lonelygirl15” — or substantial, like the military service of the president. Isn’t the discovery of that pleasure, in some sense, what drives science and all manner of detective work? We’re all on the Web, weighing various kinds of data we get — eBay listings, blog posts, Craigslist solicitations — and trying to read between some pixels, and connect others.

Sure, I don’t expect we’ll break any big news reading PerezHilton.com. But maybe we’re not entirely wasting our time; we’re practicing interpreting images from the new close-range, high-def magazines and Web sites. [e.a.]

Yes indeedy, we are.

Also, Heffernan should get a clue: there’s an entire area of cultural studies populated by “aca-fans,” like the MIT professor Henry Jenkins, who’s apparently being referred to as the Marshall McLuhan of the 21st century.

You can check out the confessions of other aca-fans Deborah Kaplan and Alan McKee on Jenkins’s blog, beginning here:

[Kaplan]: I consume vast amounts of highly denigrated popular culture: children’s and young adult literature, fan fiction, science fiction and fantasy, chick lit, science fiction television, romance novels, comics. Really, aside from the fact that I don’t watch reality television, my consumption patterns are (like many people’s) heavily lowbrow. With the exception of a few authors, I don’t read highbrow literature for pleasure, and even those highbrow authors I do read are often denigrated by the establishment for writing women’s literature, or are slotted carefully into the multicultural space available on a reading list (Jeanette Winterson, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ishmael Reed, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Kazuo Ishiguro). When I was a child I watched PBS and A&E with my parents; now I’m fond of PBS pretty much only as the network that brought me Doctor Who throughout my childhood. I don’t listen to NPR; I listen to folk or classic rock or pop stations.

And yet I am constantly being told my tastes are too highbrow.

The term “fauxtography” was coined after the events in Qana, Lebanon, this past summer. It’s a disturbing concept and an even more disturbing new reality. I just came upon a picture that illustrates (better than a thousand words) how the fauxtography sausage is made—and how hungry is the appetite for that sausage:

(via LGF)

Jeroen Oerlemans, The Netherlands, Panos Pictures. Paramedics show the dead body of a baby to the press after Israeli bombing of Qana, Lebanon, 30 July 2006

Of course, war photography doesn’t have to be so extravagantly manipulated [[scroll down for the head-on version]] in order to raise controversy. When Mathew Brady exhibited some of his photographs during the American Civil War, it had the opposite effect of what he hoped: the public was shocked and turned off.

[[ I will save the subject of contemporary war photography for another day (though you can see an example of it Andrew Sullivan, who regularly uses images as an enhancement to his rhetoric on his blog. And why not? I do it, too. I tend toward the satirical whereas Sullivan tends toward the shiv-to-the-kidney. What can I say? All is fair in love and war—every war: remember Johnny Got His Gun?

That’s the first thing I thought of when I clicked on the link Sullivan sent me to. Dalton Trumbo’s searing, graphic anti-war novel was published in 1939, on the long eve of our entry into World War II, and republished as we sank into the jungles of Vietnam. Everything old is new again. Unless you can pull off the Born Yesterday (TM) dodge or the Who Knew? (TM) defense, on the theory that Every Day Is Groundhog Day (TM) ]].

Stepping back into another era, I can attest to the power of a couple of Vietnam War photographs (and a lot of the era’s extremely successful homefront propaganda, as for example, this, but that’s also a subject for another day).

When the photo below was published in 1972, it caused a sensation. It seared the conscience and delivered a message in a way that the continuous loop of jungle-warfare scenes on nightly TV did not; if anything, those news reports deadened us to the war. With arresting photos like this, the feeling in the air was palpable. We thought we could sense the rest of the country tipping over to join us in anti-war territory. And still Nixon was re-elected.

In 1996, Charles Paul Freund wrote about “Vietnam’s Most Harrowing Photo” and the double-edged sword that is war photography:

Kim, 9 years old in 1972, had taken shelter with others in a pagoda when the American military ordered the South Vietnamese air force to attack her village of Trang Bang because it had been infiltrated by enemy forces. The pagoda was hit, killing, among others, two of Kim’s brothers. Terrified survivors streamed onto the highway, where photographer Ut snapped them. Kim is naked, screaming in fear and agony, in the center of the image.

Breaking the fourth wall behind that scene, Freund notes:

[Photographer] Ut’s was not the only camera present; the sequence exists on film as well. Because it is more dreadful physically, the film is less potent emotionally. … [T]he filmed sequence closes out the event, and gives viewers an opportunity to shrug it off. Ut’s photo is of a crowded highway winding eternally through hell, and it won’t let you go.

Indeed.

[T]he picture ran on front pages throughout America. Benjamin Spock, who chose the photo to speak for him in the 1994 exhibition “Talking Pictures,” certainly echoed many of its viewers when he wrote simply, “[I]t horrified me,” and credited it with confirming his opposition to the war.

And it worked for the North Vietnamese, too:

The image was, of course, an important piece of atrocity propaganda for the North Vietnamese, who were themselves responsible for significant suffering both before and after they attained power. Like all such atrocity material, it undermined the morale of the side responsible for the pain it depicted.

Yes, and that’s why this kind of propaganda is such an effective weapon in asymmetric warfare. However, Freund makes another crucial point:

But the political manipulation of imagery doesn’t delegitimize its content. The pain here is only too real.

Indeed—in the Vietnam photograph Freund is describing, that’s true. And that’s also what makes it distinct from the example of fauxtography I’ve been discussing, which is staged atrocity propaganda. The effect is immediate. We stop and look. We are shocked and horrified. And that is all. For: the baby is dead, all right, but we feel nothing. And not just because there are dozens of photographers in the breaking-the-fourth-wall version of the photo above.

It’s because there is a difference between authenticity and, well, faux-ness. See for example this “original” photo from the series taken at Qana:

(via EUReferendum)

compared to this, which won the World Press Photo of the Year and which was not staged but which is rich with meaning—the awful authenticity of glitter and doom living side by side in Beirut in the summer of 2006:

Spencer Platt, USA, Getty Images

Young Lebanese drive through devastated neighborhood of South Beirut, 15 August

Marie Claire decided to illustrate, via PhotoShop, a feature about ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas. (That’s her head attached to a picture of someone else.)

Drudge implies this is scandalous.

Vargas is said to be “disapppointed” at the decision of Marie Claire’s editors:

“Elizabeth was more than happy to sit for the interview but was disturbed that the magazine would set aside basic journalistic standards to photoshop her head onto a fake image. Vargas did joke that her real baby is cuter, that she is proud to breastfeed her newborn but wouldn’t do it at the anchor desk and that she wouldn’t be caught dead in that ugly gold blouse!”

I say she’s more happy about the attention than she is disturbed about the dumb “illustration.”

Still, best keep an eye on those magazines. Fauxtography isn’t just for Hezbollah propagandists anymore.