[Infowarrior] - Photography as a Weapon

[Richard Forno]

Photography as a Weapon
http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/photography-as-a-weapon/?ref=opinion

As almost everyone knows by now, various major daily newspaper  
published, on July 10, a photograph of four Iranian missiles streaking  
heavenward; then Little Green Footballs (significantly, a blog and not  
a daily newspaper) provided evidence that the photograph had been  
faked. Later, many of those same papers published a Whitman’s sampler  
of retractions and apologies. For me it raised a series of questions  
about images.[1] Do they provide illustration of a text or an idea of  
evidence of some underlying reality or both? And if they are evidence,  
don’t we have to know that the evidence is reliable, that it can be  
trusted?

Hany Farid, a Dartmouth professor and an expert on digital  
photography, has published a number of journal articles and a recent  
Scientific American article on digital photographic fraud. He seemed  
to be a good person to start with. If a photograph has been tampered  
with, he’s the person to analyze how the tampering has been done. I  
wanted to discuss with him the issue of the Iranian photograph  
starting with the issue of why we trust photographs in the first place.

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http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/photography-as-a-weapon/?ref=opinion