Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Pictures that can lie
For my choice of photo, I decided to choose the picture of a British soldier telling Iraqi civilians to take cover. I choose this picture in because of it's strong emotional and political appeal. I also understand how altering such a photo would cause a great amount of controversy, though no harm may actually have been done. The image was altered by its creator, Los Angeles Times staff photographer Brian Walski. The image is in fact two separate images combined into one. My guess is that Walski's goal was to combined the image of the protective soldier and the Iraqi father carrying his child in order to have a stronger emotional impact on viewers. This could be that he supports the Iraq invasion and sought to use this picture as a sort of justification. It could also simply be that he wanted to create a photo that was especially potent. Either way, it's hard to say whether or not he actually did any harm. Yes, it was wrong of him to doctrine the photo's and pass it off as the truth. The TRUTH is however, that this scene depicted within the photo is all to real of a reality in Iraq. I believe that his heart may have been in the right place, but the ends do not justify the means.
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4 comments:
I completely agree with you. No matter what cause he was trying to argue for by altering his photo, I don't think that creating such a fraudulent image is an effective way of doing so. It most likely did the opposite and undermined his credibility.
I chose the exact same photo. I didn't like how people can think that they can get away with fraudulent images for a quick buck. It makes me angry...thats why I chose the same picture you did, British soldier
I actually picked up on the potentially opposite motivation for the photographer's manipulation of the image. I felt that the image of a soldier surrounded by a mass of somewhat confused or even panicked-looking civillians is meant to give the viewer a sense that something bad had happened to force these people into such a situation, and could be coming from an anti-war perspective.
This picture, I would say, has seemed to elicit the most disparate arguments. Thanks for your pithy blog. I think you were right in saying that there were better ways to go about getting a point across.
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