viz.

No Caption Needed has posted a brilliant analysis of the theatricality of presidential campaigns.

Jim Wilson/New York Times

From the post:

You are looking at a photo from last week of Fred Thompson stepping onto a stage in Prosperity, South Carolina. The long view allows us to see the candidate as part of a scene, rather someone around whom everything else is compressed. The view also isolates each part of the scene: candidate, bunting, handler, local supporter, and wife-and-kid are each identifiable as if pieces of a grade school diorama. What is most revealing, however, is that we see both stage and backstage in a single view. What would have been The Candidate framed by the Red White and Blue becomes instead a tacky stage set–hey, don’t trip on that cord! And instead of those gathered in his name, we see instead wife-and-kid waiting in the wings, or waiting to make their entrance, but either way now bit players that make Thompson no more than the lead in the school play.

If you're interested in amateur photography or early twentieth century life in the U.S., check out this site Square America. The site consists of collections of photographs found at garage sales and flea markets of American life during the first three quarters of the twentieth century.

The Library of Congress has created its own Flickr homepage and posted 3,000 public-domain photos to the site. This first collection of the LOC’s 14 million images is part of a pilot project called “The Commons.” The images are labeled with the photographer’s name and short descriptions, but the LOC is relying on Flickr’s users to provide tags for the images.

This is a fantastic idea. Not only is it great for the public, who will have easier access to these images, it should be great for the LOC, who are offloading to resource-intensive tasks—cataloguing and hosting the images—to a service that will do them both for free.

Jezebel picked up on a story in the Washington Post and the The Daily Telegraph about the surprising shared cameraman (Nick Ut) behind the following well-known photographs:

Interesting arrangement/focus in the leading photo on the front page of The New York Times:

(Doug Mills/The New York Times)
Gore finds himself in front here (a little too close) and President Bush smiles, leering over his shoulder. The entire composition feels uncomfortable and, if this weren't the feeling they were going for, I'm sure the awkward photo would have ended up on the (virtual) cutting room floor.

Maybe I'm just feeling seasonal, but it seems they've chosen one of these men as the Grinch:

Wonkette offers a different shot in which GWB is somewhat less creepy.

Paul Lukas, who runs a weblog called Uni Watch (the obsessive study of athletics aesthetics), has an entry up on the swastika and uniforms from the early 1900s. This picture shows the Edmonton Swastikas from 1916. Lukas details the popularity of the swastika graphic prior to its ignominious use by the Nazi party. Lukas’ piece is interesting for a variety of reasons (including some nice images and a link to a “Canadian artist/mystic” devoted to rescuing the swastika from its association with the Nazis), but it got me thinking about the ease with which images become iconic (at times unintentionally or at cross purposes with an image’s original meaning) and the kinds of control this easy iconicity demands in visual practice.

I recently read a New Yorker article that mentioned the spell-binding youtube video "Women in Film" seen below. It's quite mesmerizing, have a look.

I’ve spent the past hour trying to think of an educational or theoretical reason for posting this link, but I can’t come up with anything. Here it is anyway.

The image above was taken from Google Earth and shows the barracks at the U.S. Naval base in Corronado, California. Aparently the buildings are lovely from the ground, but from the air they’re, uh, offensive. The Navy is planning to spend “$600,000 for landscaping and architectural modifications” to alter the way the barracks look from the air.

What I find interesting about this story is that Google Earth “created” this problem for the Navy. The technology literally allowed people to see this symbol. It reminded me of this passage from Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Aleph”:

The New York Times has posted an interview with Dartmouth’s Hany Farid, the creator of “digital forensics.” Here’s how Dr. Farid describes the field:

It’s a new field. It didn’t exist five years ago. We look at digital media—images, audio and video—and we try to ascertain whether or not they’ve been manipulated. We use mathematical and computational techniques to detect alterations in them.

In society today, we’re now seeing doctored images regularly. If tabloids can’t obtain a photo of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie walking together on a beach, they’ll make up a composite from two pictures. Star actually did that. And it’s happening in the courts, politics and scientific journals, too. As a result, we now live in an age when the once-held belief that photographs were the definitive record of events is gone.

Actually, photographic forgeries aren’t new. People have doctored images since the beginning of photography. But the techniques needed to do that during the Civil War, when Mathew Brady made composites, were extremely difficult and time consuming. In today’s world, anyone with a digital camera, a PC, Photoshop and an hour’s worth of time can make fairly compelling digital forgeries.

Dr. Farid makes some other interesting claims as well. Since 1990, the percentage of fraud cases involving photos has risen from 3 percent to 44.1 percent. While the majority of the interview focuses on digital manipulation in scientific research, clearly photographic forgery is becoming a significant problem in all areas of society.