me•dia

August 20, 2008

Digital image alteration, revisionist history

Filed under: New Media/Old Media, New Tech, visual culture — crain @ 10:32 am

In the NYT: I was there. Just ask Photoshop. Williams, Alex. Aug 17, 2008.

As image-editing software grows in sophistication and ubiquity, alterations go far beyond removing red-eye and whitening teeth. They include substituting head shots to achieve the best combination of smiles, deleting problematic personalities or adding family members who were unable to attend important events, performing virtual liposuction or hair restoration, even reanimating the dead. Revisionist history, it seems, can be practiced by just about anyone.

This article could be paired with the previous post to illustrate two opposing affordances of digital tech (esp. at the consumer level). The previous post deals with challenging official narratives, where this story involves altering (photoshopping) our own histories.

[[[Could be used in 391 for Nov 19, visual culture

Here is a related story, also from NYT: Photography as a weapon. Morris, E. Aug 11, 2008.

Iranian Godzilla

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