Contemporary news agencies are often
blamed for photo manipulations. It started long ago in fact. Back in the
times of WWII graphic artists learnt to distor reality and show what
they wanted to show but not what really had happened. Thus, they often
added excessive Nazi atrocities, terrible ruins and looting to fill
papers with horrifying images.
However we do not have to exclude that
such atrocities and other terrific events could really happen, it was
just difficult to catch them with a camera due to their spontaneity.
Photographers were rarely in a right time and in a right place. It's
today when everyone has a cameraphone we can shoot everything we see.
Photo manipulations as an instrument of
propaganda is claimed to be natural. Below you will see some photos
taken during WWII that underwent montage for the purpose of propaganda.
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Just another reminder that everyone should be skeptical of photographic and video evidence, just as they are for eye-witnesses. If Hollywood can create a 2 hour movie featuring dinosaurs or epic spaceship battles, why would anyone put absolute faith in a grainy video clip? All pictures and video, like other evidence, needs to be cross examined for authenticity and the default setting should be "unproven".
ReplyDeleteIt opened my eyes as I always took the above photo as gospel.
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