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2 interesting pieces- one from the past that seems quaint by today's "standards" and a more contemporary offering.
October 18, 2009 , 9:30 pm
The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock (Part 1)
By Errol Morris
The drought continued.
On June 21, Gov. Welford flew to Washington to ask President Roosevelt for aid. On June 23, Roosevelt ordered Dr. Tugwell, head of the Resettlement Administration, to make a survey of the needs in Dakotas and Montana. A million dollars in aid had been requested.
Within a week, a heat wave spread across the Western plains. Newspapers reported it was 111 degrees in North Dakota. By July 7, it was a record 119 degrees in parts of the state. Fields were scorched brown and black. The range country seemed to be covered with a tan moss so close to the ground that the hungry cattle could not reach it; so dry was the covering that it was useless for sheep. It was estimated that 85 percent of the cattle in North Dakota would have to be moved out of state or sent to slaughter. The federal government stepped forward with $5 million to buy a million head of cattle — with the meat to go to the needy.
Grasshoppers descended on the region, their vast numbers consuming what little crops remained. By July 9, heat had killed 120 across the country.
On July 11, the people of Mitchell, S.D., turned once more to prayer. Bells in the city’s 13 church towers tolled the signal to the people, 11,000 in number, to fall to their knees. The temperature stood at 104 degrees. Still the rain did not come.
On July 17, Washington responded to the worsening situation with a vast migration plan. Thousands of families would be moved by the federal government — about 30 percent of the farm families of North Dakota would be taken off their barren land. The grasshoppers marched on.
By August, small cactus plants were the only living vegetation over large areas along the Dakota-Montana line. The grasshoppers were gone now, killed by the intense heat or starved to death. They had been replaced by an infestation of rodents driven into homes in search of food. By Aug. 9 supplies of traps in North Dakota were exhausted. Home owners anxiously awaited new shipments to relieve the situation.
The land was turning to desert and dust. It felt like the end of the world.
On Aug. 25, Franklin Delano Roosevelt boarded a train for the Dakotas.
It was the 1936 presidential election. The issues would be familiar to today’s voters. Roosevelt, the eastern Democrat, arguing for the intervention of government in the economy, and Alf Landon, the midwestern Republican, arguing for a laissez-faire approach free of government controls and intervention. Roosevelt, campaigning for a second term, was on a train (“the Dustbowl Special”) headed towards the Dakota badlands. Everything was in place for a series of photo opportunities and news stories that would cast his efforts to fight the drought in the best possible light. But, unknown to F.D.R., a controversy was brewing, a controversy involving photography. Time magazine observed:
By 1937 (because of intense Congressional pressure) it had been folded into a new agency, the Farm Security Administration (F.S.A.) designed to combat rural poverty. If this was all there was to it, the R.A. and F.S.A. might have been forgotten by history [1]. But there was a small photography program, part of the Information Division of the F.S.A., headed by Roy Stryker, that nurtured many of the important photographers of the 1930s: Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Ben Shahn and Arthur Rothstein, among others. It also produced Pare Lorenz’s extraordinary documentary films “The Plow that Broke the Plains” and “The River” [2].
If one can imagine the political animosity that would have been generated if, as part of the current stimulus package, President Obama introduced a national documentary photography program, then it is possible to understand the opposition that the F.S.A. faced. Fiscal conservatives did not want to see their hard-earned tax dollars spent on relief, let alone a government photography program, of all things. And in Arthur Rothstein’s photograph of a sun-bleached cow skull, Roosevelt’s opponents had found their proof of government waste, duplicity and fraud. A salvo was fired across the front pages of the Fargo Forum.
“Drought Counterfeiters Get Our Dander Up” and “It’s a Fake: Daily Newspapers Throughout the United States Fell For this Gem Among Phony Pictures.” The paper referred to “the man with the wooden-nickel pictures” and contained three claimed examples of photo-fakery: Arthur Rothstein’s cow skull photograph (taken for the Resettlement Administration Farm Security Administration — later known as the Farm Security Administration, or F.S.A. — and distributed by the government to the Associated Press); a composite photograph of cattle grazing next to the North Dakota state capitol (printed in The New York Times); and a picture supposedly of a
section of the Missouri River near Stanton, N.D. (widely distributed by the Associated Press).
Three different photographs. Three accusations of photo-fakery. Of the three, only one appeared to be an out-and-out fraud, the picture of the cattle and capitol. It appeared in The New York Times on Sunday, Aug. 9, 1936, with the caption: “Cattle Invade a State Capitol. A herd driven from the drought area contentedly grazes on the Capitol grounds at Bismarck, N. D.” As the Forum reported:
By September, accusations of fraud were all over the place. There were dozens of articles about supposed photo-fraud and the cow skull.
The argument that photographs of typical conditions were recast as evidence of drought was also an issue with Rothstein’s skull photographs. An editorial in The New York Sun (Sept. 8) reported that “one of our readers has done a post-mortem on the skull.”
Photographic controversies notwithstanding, F.D.R. won by a landslide. He collected over 60 percent of the popular vote and carried every state but Maine and Vermont. One reporter remarked, “It’s no longer as Maine goes, so goes the nation; it’s as Maine goes, so goes Vermont.” Now over 70 years since the 1936 cow skull controversies, the debate continues about photography and propaganda. None of these issues have been laid to rest. Far from it. Claims of posing, false captioning, and faking regularly appear in much the same way as they appeared in the 1930s. Clearly, Photoshop is not the cause of these controversies. They predate Photoshop and other modern means of altering photographs by more than a half century. But they allow us to ask an important question. What can we of the Great Recession learn from the photographs of the Great Depression?
http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009...-clock-part-1/
Photography as a Weapon
By Errol Morris You have your fear, which might become reality;
and then you have Godzilla, who is reality.
— from the movie “Godzilla: King of the Monsters”
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.
HANY FARID: The short answer is: I don’t know. The longer answer is: if you look at the neurological level, what’s happening in our brain, roughly 30 to 50 percent of our brain is doing visual processing. It’s just processing the visual imagery that comes in, and if you think about it in terms of bandwidth, there is a remarkable amount of information entering into our eyes and being processed by the brain. Now, the brain samples like a video camera, but 30 frames a second, high resolution, massive amounts of information. Vision is a pretty unique sense for the brain. It’s incredibly powerful and is very valuable from an evolutionary point of view. So it’s not surprising that it has an emotional effect on us. The Vietnam War, the war abroad and the war at home, has been reduced to a few iconic images — the Napalm girl, the girl at Kent State. What seems to emerge from major events and eras are one or two images that effectively embody the emotion and rage, the happiness and anger. The whole thing somehow is enfolded in there. The brain is just very good at processing visual imageries and bringing in memories associated with images.
ERROL MORRIS: But text is often brought in visually as well.
HANY FARID: Sure, but processed in a different part of the brain. So, yes, the visual system has to process it, but where it’s actually being processed is not in the back of the brain where the visual processing is, it’s on the side of the brain. It’s the language center, which is completely different. And there are plenty of people out there, my girlfriend is a middle school teacher and she talks all the time about kids who are visual learners and kids who are language learners, and who are auditory. So there’s different ways of processing information. But there’s no doubt that it is remarkably powerful. For example, when you put out a fake, like the Kerry/Fonda one.[2] And even like this missile one. You start putting it out there and saying, “Oh look, this picture? It’s a fake. This picture? It’s a fake.” But you know what people remember? They don’t remember, “It’s a fake.” They remember the picture. And there are psychology studies, when you tell people that information is incorrect, they forget that it is incorrect. They only remember the misinformation. They forget the tag associated with it. They did these great studies, especially with older people. They give them information about health, Medicare, Medicaid, that kind of stuff. And they say, “this information that you heard? It’s wrong.” And what ends up happening is, that information gets ingrained into their brains, and even if they are subsequently told it’s wrong, they end up believing it.[3] [4]
ERROL MORRIS: It occurred to me, just with respect to the missile photograph, that if the people who Photoshopped this photograph wanted to call additional attention to it, they could do no better than what they did.
HANY FARID: That’s exactly right. Look at how much attention is being brought to it. At the end of the day, even though they doctored the photograph, it shows that these guys still fired three missiles, and they sure brought a lot of attention to it.
ERROL MORRIS: The threat remains. What are we supposed to infer? It’s a fake, so there is no need to worry? The real threat is only 75 percent of what we thought. Three missiles instead of four.
HANY FARID: It raises a whole other level of information warfare, right? You intentionally put things out there just to know that the controversy in and off itself will help you make your point.
ERROL MORRIS: And since it is a version of chest thumping or saber rattling — whatever you want to call it — the thumping and the rattling linger on.
HANY FARID: Has there been a response from the Iranians?
ERROL MORRIS: A variety of different responses — from bellicose to reassuring. Ahmadinejad said that Iran had no intention of attacking Israel.[5]
HANY FARID: But no admission about doctoring the photograph?
ERROL MORRIS: No. Not that I’m aware of. But doctored photographs are the least of our worries. If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don’t need Photoshop. You don’t need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don’t need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption.
[The photographs presented by Colin Powell at the United Nations in 2003 provide several examples. Photographs that were used to justify a war. And yet, the actual photographs are low-res, muddy aerial surveillance photographs of buildings and vehicles on the ground in Iraq. I’m not an aerial intelligence expert. I could be looking at anything. It is the labels, the captions, and the surrounding text that turn the images from one thing into another.[6]
Powell was arguing that the Iraqis were doing something wrong, knew they were doing something wrong, and were trying to cover their tracks. Later, it was revealed that the captions were wrong. There was no evidence of chemical weapons and no evidence of concealment.
There is a larger point. I don’t know what these buildings were really used for. I don’t know whether they were used for chemical weapons at one time, and then transformed into something relatively innocuous, in order to hide the reality of what was going on from weapons inspectors. But I do know that the yellow captions influence how we see the pictures. “Chemical Munitions Bunker” is different from “Empty Warehouse” which is different from “International House of Pancakes.” The image remains the same but we see it differently.[7]
Change the yellow labels, change the caption and you change the meaning of the photographs. You don’t need Photoshop. That’s the disturbing part. Captions do the heavy lifting as far as deception is concerned. The pictures merely provide the window-dressing. The unending series of errors engendered by falsely captioned photographs are rarely remarked on. – E.M.]
HANY FARID: You are absolutely right; you don’t need Photoshop to editorialize. We can go back to Mao and Stalin and Castro and Mussolini, and all these guys. All the dictators doctored photographs in order to effectively change history. So why is this a big deal? Is it because of the power of visual imagery, the fact that it resonates so much? Maybe that will change with the next generation. Maybe this new generation will be thinking about images differently. There is a savviness about what technology can do. Kids now are growing up in digital age where they routinely see doctored images in their mailboxes, in the media, on television, and so on and so forth.
ERROL MORRIS: But, as we become more and more sophisticated about images — about how images are processed — haven’t we become more sophisticated about detecting fraud? Photoshop manipulations are relatively easy to detect. They fool the eye, but they don’t necessarily fool the expert.
HANY FARID: The answer is: yes and no. It depends on the image source. So, if we have the raw files[8], if we have the original footage from someone’s digital camera, you can’t fool us anymore. We have enough technology today where, given the camera, the original images that came off the camera, we can tell if you’ve manipulated them. If, however, you are talking about an image that has been cropped and reduced and compressed and posted on the web, then we might be able to do it, but there’s no guarantee. The task is decidedly harder because a lot of information has been thrown away. You’ve compressed the image; you’ve resized it. This is why all the Loch Ness monster and ghost images are always so tiny and grainy, because then you can’t see the signs of tampering. With low-res images it’s much harder to detect a fake. Definitely, when we have a high-res original image, we are much better at it.
[People often trust low-res images because they look more real. But of course they are not more real, just easier to fake. We look at picture of Nessie (the Loch Ness Monster). It’s grainy, fuzzy. It’s hard to make anything out. You never see a 10-megapixel photograph of Big Foot or the Abominable Snowman or the Loch Ness Monster. One explanation is: these monsters don’t exist. But if they did exist — so the thinking goes — they are probably unwilling to sit still for portraiture. The grainy images are proof of how elusive Nessie can be. This belief extends to documentary filmmaking, as well. If it’s badly shot, it’s more authentic. – E.M.]
ERROL MORRIS: Well, finding evidence that someone has used the Photoshop clone-tool is relatively easy, isn’t it, if you have a raw file in front of you as a comparison?
HANY FARID: Well, certainly if you have the original, but even without the original, we’re actually pretty good at detecting cloning. Now interestingly, in the Iranian missile image, I actually ran the clone detection software, and it did not detect it. Here’s the reason: they’re not perfect clones. They actually have been adjusted a little bit, and if you look carefully at the image, you will see this. There are two things going on. First of all, the image has been JPEG compressed, which changes the cloning a little bit, but we can still detect cloning in the present JPEG. But what happened is it was altered after it was cloned. Somebody went in and actually manipulated in small places to make it look less obvious. The Iranian photograph was done much more carefully and much more subtly. There were these four folds of smoke in the bottom right hand corner in one of the plumes. If they had actually adjusted that a little bit, which is what I do when I clone, people wouldn’t have seen it. That makes the fake even more impressive, because it wasn’t just copy, paste. We would have detected that. And frankly, if we didn’t have the photo with the third missile not launching, and somebody asked me what do you think, I would have said, “Well, I think it’s suspicious, but I’m not sure.”
ERROL MORRIS: But here’s a question. First, there was one picture. Then there were two. When did the second picture become available? Did the Iranians post both photographs, the cloned and the uncloned original? If I’m interested in deceiving you, and I have produced an altered photograph B based on photograph A, which has not been cloned, don’t I suppress A? Don’t I suppress the unaltered photograph?
HANY FARID: I don’t know where it [the three-missile photograph] came from.[9] Maybe there was just another photographer there. And if you look, it is not the original photograph that was manipulated. The photo with three missiles was taken just before, and from a slightly different vantage point. So I think what was happening was that there was another photographer and that image got released also, and that’s how we know that the third missile misfired. By the way, it’s not obvious, although everybody’s saying it is, that this is only a clone job. It could’ve been that that fourth missile fired, just at a later time, so that they tested it afterwards. It fired, they took a picture of it, and then they composited it, as opposed to cloned it, into the original picture. That also would explain why they’re not exact copies of each other. So I’m not exactly sure what happened.
ERROL MORRIS: If you believe that it could not have been simple cloning, or they went in and they altered a pixel here and there, to muddy the waters, can you really say that with certainty?
HANY FARID: The reason why we’re sure it was tampered with is because we have that other photograph. That’s why we know, right? That’s what really locks it in.
ERROL MORRIS: But how do you know that that other photograph hasn’t been altered?
HANY FARID: That’s a fair question. How do we know that that one’s not fake, as well?
ERROL MORRIS: Yes. There’s a remarkable story about the forging of the Hitler diaries. The forger was so prolific, he created so many forgeries — letters, watercolors, diaries, etc. — that handwriting analysts (charged with the task of authenticating the diaries) took writing examples done by the forger thinking they were genuine examples of Hitler’s handwriting and compared them to the diaries. They authenticated the diaries on that basis.[10] Often we make a comparison between something that we believe is real and something that we believe is fake. I guess the moral of the story is we should always consider the possibility that we may be comparing something fake with something else that is fake.
HANY FARID: It’s sort of like Rembrandt, right? His body of work has been shrinking for decades now, right? And so what’s considered to be his body of work is completely different now, cause he was faked so heavily. It’s a good question. The reason why we believe that the one with the four missiles is fake is that there is pretty strong, at least circumstantial, evidence that the cloning was there. The plumes of smoke look very, very similar. There are a lot of little pieces. But also, when you clone with a standard clone tool, there’s like a soft cloning, so it does a little bit of like alpha matting, so that it’s not a hard edge. And you see along the rocks, there’s definitely some funny business going on. Again, visually it’s not a certainty. But it certainly looks more suspicious.
ERROL MORRIS: But when we see something suspicious, aren’t we asking also asking the questions: What are they up to? Why are they doing this? Why are there three missiles in one photograph and four in another? What is going on here? What were they thinking? The simple answer: If my desire is to present a bellicose posture to the West, fine, clone a couple of those missiles. We know it’s a fake. But what are we supposed to infer from the photograph? Is it that these Iranians are so unscrupulous they will stop at nothing?
http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008...y-as-a-weapon/
October 18, 2009 , 9:30 pm
The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock (Part 1)
By Errol Morris
Republican editors throughout the land were soon rubbing their hands over a dispatch which, on quick reading, seemed to convict the New Deal’s cherished resettlement Administration of photographic fakery and bad faith.
— Time Magazine
Summer of 1936. One of the worst droughts in American history. On June 7, North Dakota’s Republican governor, Wallace Welford, proclaimed a day of prayer. The citizens of North Dakota would kneel en masse to pray for rain. “Only Providence,” the governor declared, could avert “another tragedy of tremendous proportions.” Devil’s Lake, N.D., recorded .16 of an inch.— Time Magazine
The drought continued.
On June 21, Gov. Welford flew to Washington to ask President Roosevelt for aid. On June 23, Roosevelt ordered Dr. Tugwell, head of the Resettlement Administration, to make a survey of the needs in Dakotas and Montana. A million dollars in aid had been requested.
Within a week, a heat wave spread across the Western plains. Newspapers reported it was 111 degrees in North Dakota. By July 7, it was a record 119 degrees in parts of the state. Fields were scorched brown and black. The range country seemed to be covered with a tan moss so close to the ground that the hungry cattle could not reach it; so dry was the covering that it was useless for sheep. It was estimated that 85 percent of the cattle in North Dakota would have to be moved out of state or sent to slaughter. The federal government stepped forward with $5 million to buy a million head of cattle — with the meat to go to the needy.
Grasshoppers descended on the region, their vast numbers consuming what little crops remained. By July 9, heat had killed 120 across the country.
On July 11, the people of Mitchell, S.D., turned once more to prayer. Bells in the city’s 13 church towers tolled the signal to the people, 11,000 in number, to fall to their knees. The temperature stood at 104 degrees. Still the rain did not come.
On July 17, Washington responded to the worsening situation with a vast migration plan. Thousands of families would be moved by the federal government — about 30 percent of the farm families of North Dakota would be taken off their barren land. The grasshoppers marched on.
By August, small cactus plants were the only living vegetation over large areas along the Dakota-Montana line. The grasshoppers were gone now, killed by the intense heat or starved to death. They had been replaced by an infestation of rodents driven into homes in search of food. By Aug. 9 supplies of traps in North Dakota were exhausted. Home owners anxiously awaited new shipments to relieve the situation.
The land was turning to desert and dust. It felt like the end of the world.
On Aug. 25, Franklin Delano Roosevelt boarded a train for the Dakotas.
It was the 1936 presidential election. The issues would be familiar to today’s voters. Roosevelt, the eastern Democrat, arguing for the intervention of government in the economy, and Alf Landon, the midwestern Republican, arguing for a laissez-faire approach free of government controls and intervention. Roosevelt, campaigning for a second term, was on a train (“the Dustbowl Special”) headed towards the Dakota badlands. Everything was in place for a series of photo opportunities and news stories that would cast his efforts to fight the drought in the best possible light. But, unknown to F.D.R., a controversy was brewing, a controversy involving photography. Time magazine observed:
…when Franklin Roosevelt’s special train rolled into Bismarck, N. Dakota in the course of its travels through the drought areas it also rolled into a story which brought nationwide attention to a small-town newspaper. Aboard the Presidential Pullmans were placed scores of copies of the Fargo (N. Dakota) Forum, whose front page displayed a strange yarn. Because a corps of the nation’s nimblest news hawks were also on the train, Republican editors throughout the land were soon rubbing their hands over a dispatch which, on quick reading, seemed to convict the New Deal’s cherished resettlement Administration of photographic fakery and bad faith.
In 1935, Roosevelt organized the Resettlement Administration (R.A.), a federal agency responsible for relocating struggling urban and rural families. By 1937 (because of intense Congressional pressure) it had been folded into a new agency, the Farm Security Administration (F.S.A.) designed to combat rural poverty. If this was all there was to it, the R.A. and F.S.A. might have been forgotten by history [1]. But there was a small photography program, part of the Information Division of the F.S.A., headed by Roy Stryker, that nurtured many of the important photographers of the 1930s: Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Ben Shahn and Arthur Rothstein, among others. It also produced Pare Lorenz’s extraordinary documentary films “The Plow that Broke the Plains” and “The River” [2].
If one can imagine the political animosity that would have been generated if, as part of the current stimulus package, President Obama introduced a national documentary photography program, then it is possible to understand the opposition that the F.S.A. faced. Fiscal conservatives did not want to see their hard-earned tax dollars spent on relief, let alone a government photography program, of all things. And in Arthur Rothstein’s photograph of a sun-bleached cow skull, Roosevelt’s opponents had found their proof of government waste, duplicity and fraud. A salvo was fired across the front pages of the Fargo Forum.
“Drought Counterfeiters Get Our Dander Up” and “It’s a Fake: Daily Newspapers Throughout the United States Fell For this Gem Among Phony Pictures.” The paper referred to “the man with the wooden-nickel pictures” and contained three claimed examples of photo-fakery: Arthur Rothstein’s cow skull photograph (taken for the Resettlement Administration Farm Security Administration — later known as the Farm Security Administration, or F.S.A. — and distributed by the government to the Associated Press); a composite photograph of cattle grazing next to the North Dakota state capitol (printed in The New York Times); and a picture supposedly of a
section of the Missouri River near Stanton, N.D. (widely distributed by the Associated Press).
Three different photographs. Three accusations of photo-fakery. Of the three, only one appeared to be an out-and-out fraud, the picture of the cattle and capitol. It appeared in The New York Times on Sunday, Aug. 9, 1936, with the caption: “Cattle Invade a State Capitol. A herd driven from the drought area contentedly grazes on the Capitol grounds at Bismarck, N. D.” As the Forum reported:
If these cows could only read. You’d think they’d been eating loco weed. Where those cows are presumably grazing is a graveled parking lot at the rear of the state capitol, thickly dotted with cars at all hours of the day. The picture fake, foisted on innocent, unsuspecting newspapers, is the result of a photographic trick — superimposing a herd of cattle on a picture of the North Dakota capitol building.
The picture of the Missouri River was at best miscaptioned:Blushingly, The Fargo Forum admits that it too fell for this photographic gold brick, a blatant, crude fake, which went out to the unsuspecting Associated Press from a too-smart photographer who wanted nickels [presumably, a somewhat obscure reference to “wooden-nickel pictures]. To the right is the faked picture, purportedly showing a section of the Missouri river near Stanton, N.D., purportedly showing the water receded sufficiently to permit automobiles to ford the stream without difficulty. Above is the actual, honest picture of the Missouri river at Stanton N.D., as it was at the time the faked picture purportedly was taken. The contraption in the foreground is a ferry which has been in operation 20 years, missing trips only because of the wind or ice, never because of low water. The river is about 16 feet deep at a point about 50 feet from shore.
But it was a photograph of a cow skull taken by a young photographer, Arthur Rothstein, that brought out the real nastiness.There never was a year when a scene like this couldn’t be produced in N. Dakota, even in years where rainfall levels were far above normal. What we see here is a typical alkali flat, left when melting snow water and spring rains had passed in the changing seasons. Without difficulty, one can find these in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Indiana, wherever one chooses. The skull? Oh, that’s a moveable “prop,” which comes in handy for photographers who want to touch up their photographs with a bit of the grisly.
The “moveable prop,” the cow skull, could be transported about by an unscrupulous Roosevelt administration propagandist, deposited on a “typical alkali flat,” photographed, and sold to anyone who needed a picture of drought. Part of the problem was the cow skull photograph had been taken before the summer months of the drought — in May 1936 [3]. And the Farm Security Administration (F.S.A.) had provided several “versions” of the photograph. The same cow skull had been photographed in different locations, as if the photographer was looking for the perfect landscape to make his case. The Fargo Forum was further incensed by the idea that North Dakota farmers had been badly served by the cow skull. Several articles offer a spirited defense of North Dakota farmers and spoke of the extraordinary agricultural “wealth” produced in the Red River Valley.By September, accusations of fraud were all over the place. There were dozens of articles about supposed photo-fraud and the cow skull.
Aug. 29, The New York Sun, “Drought Photo Branded Fake.”
Aug. 30, The Washington Star, “Drought Skull Picture Faking Head Admitted by the New Deal.”
Aug. 31, The Fargo Evening Forum, “Eastern Press Follows Forum’s Lead, Unearths History of this Fake Photo.”
Sept. 4, The Fargo Evening Forum, “RA’s Perambulating Skull in Poignant Poses.”
Sept. 5, The Topeka Kansas Capitol, “There’s Skullduggery here.”
Sept. 6, Waterbury Republican, “Lights! Camera!”
Sept. 15, The Burlington Louisiana Hawkeye, “Fakery – Then Bad Faith.”
Sept. 16, Chicago News, “That Stage-prop Skull.”
The conflict produced an almost endless array of accusations, retractions and counter-accusations — a roundelay of finger-pointing. Buried on a back page on Sept. 6, The Times published a correction regarding the alleged composite photograph of cattle grazing in front of the state capitol building: “a North Dakota newspaper has publicly retracted its charges that a WPA photographer “faked” a drought picture in Bismarck…” The cattle were in front of the North Dakota capitol; the photograph had not been faked. One picture had not been combined with another. The report of the fake had been a fake. And yet, once the faked photograph had been re-baptized as an “honest” photo, the claims against it started all over again. On Sept. 9, The Times published an article, “[The Fargo Forum] Denies Retracting WPA ‘Fake’ Charge, Paper Again Attacks Drought Picture, saying Cattle Have Always Grazed at Capitol.”Aug. 30, The Washington Star, “Drought Skull Picture Faking Head Admitted by the New Deal.”
Aug. 31, The Fargo Evening Forum, “Eastern Press Follows Forum’s Lead, Unearths History of this Fake Photo.”
Sept. 4, The Fargo Evening Forum, “RA’s Perambulating Skull in Poignant Poses.”
Sept. 5, The Topeka Kansas Capitol, “There’s Skullduggery here.”
Sept. 6, Waterbury Republican, “Lights! Camera!”
Sept. 15, The Burlington Louisiana Hawkeye, “Fakery – Then Bad Faith.”
Sept. 16, Chicago News, “That Stage-prop Skull.”
The Fargo Forum has not retracted the charge that the cattle picture was a drought fake. “It was a drought fake and is a drought fake.” The newspaper then relates the history of the picture, which it at first believed to be the result of superimposing one shot on another, then discovered it to be an actual shot of dairy cattle owned by a Bismarck dairyman which frequently meander through the Capitol grounds. The Capitol is bordered on three sides by open farming and ranch land.
Watchman for years have had the job of chasing wandering cows away from the building. “The Fargo Forum was wrong when it said that the cattle picture was the result of superimposing one picture on another. It was wrong and it said so. That did not alter the status of the picture as a fake one whit.”
The Fargo Forum first charged that the picture was created by combining two pictures. And was fake for that reason. Then, when it became clear that the photograph was one picture – not two pictures blended together — the argument changed. The picture was not a picture of drought because cattle had always grazed on the land surrounding the Capitol building — in good years and in drought years. The picture had been taken during a good year. So it becomes a fake by virtue of its caption rather than the hands-on manipulation of the image. If people object to an inference that can be made (properly or improperly) from a photograph — that there is a drought — then they will find fault with the photograph itself.Watchman for years have had the job of chasing wandering cows away from the building. “The Fargo Forum was wrong when it said that the cattle picture was the result of superimposing one picture on another. It was wrong and it said so. That did not alter the status of the picture as a fake one whit.”
The argument that photographs of typical conditions were recast as evidence of drought was also an issue with Rothstein’s skull photographs. An editorial in The New York Sun (Sept. 8) reported that “one of our readers has done a post-mortem on the skull.”
The wrinkled condition at the base of the horns of this bleached skull clearly indicates that the animal was very old. It probably died of old age in some winter blizzard. Its bleached condition shows that it has been out in the weather three years or more. As an exhibit of the effect of the drought in western North Dakota it is clearly a fake.
What makes these accusations of photo-fakery utterly perverse is the claim that they unfairly portrayed a drought. The photographs led the viewer to infer that the Dakotas were experiencing a drought. But the Dakotas were experiencing a drought. One of the worst droughts in American history. Was the real issue that the cow had died of old age rather than drought? Or that the cow skull had been moved less than 10 feet, as Rothstein later claimed? Or had been moved at all? Or that multiple photographs had been taken? Or was it merely an attempt to shift the nature of the debate from the agricultural problems facing the country to an argument about photography and propaganda [4]?Photographic controversies notwithstanding, F.D.R. won by a landslide. He collected over 60 percent of the popular vote and carried every state but Maine and Vermont. One reporter remarked, “It’s no longer as Maine goes, so goes the nation; it’s as Maine goes, so goes Vermont.” Now over 70 years since the 1936 cow skull controversies, the debate continues about photography and propaganda. None of these issues have been laid to rest. Far from it. Claims of posing, false captioning, and faking regularly appear in much the same way as they appeared in the 1930s. Clearly, Photoshop is not the cause of these controversies. They predate Photoshop and other modern means of altering photographs by more than a half century. But they allow us to ask an important question. What can we of the Great Recession learn from the photographs of the Great Depression?
http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009...-clock-part-1/
Photography as a Weapon
By Errol Morris You have your fear, which might become reality;
and then you have Godzilla, who is reality.
— from the movie “Godzilla: King of the Monsters”
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.
HANY FARID: The short answer is: I don’t know. The longer answer is: if you look at the neurological level, what’s happening in our brain, roughly 30 to 50 percent of our brain is doing visual processing. It’s just processing the visual imagery that comes in, and if you think about it in terms of bandwidth, there is a remarkable amount of information entering into our eyes and being processed by the brain. Now, the brain samples like a video camera, but 30 frames a second, high resolution, massive amounts of information. Vision is a pretty unique sense for the brain. It’s incredibly powerful and is very valuable from an evolutionary point of view. So it’s not surprising that it has an emotional effect on us. The Vietnam War, the war abroad and the war at home, has been reduced to a few iconic images — the Napalm girl, the girl at Kent State. What seems to emerge from major events and eras are one or two images that effectively embody the emotion and rage, the happiness and anger. The whole thing somehow is enfolded in there. The brain is just very good at processing visual imageries and bringing in memories associated with images.
ERROL MORRIS: But text is often brought in visually as well.
HANY FARID: Sure, but processed in a different part of the brain. So, yes, the visual system has to process it, but where it’s actually being processed is not in the back of the brain where the visual processing is, it’s on the side of the brain. It’s the language center, which is completely different. And there are plenty of people out there, my girlfriend is a middle school teacher and she talks all the time about kids who are visual learners and kids who are language learners, and who are auditory. So there’s different ways of processing information. But there’s no doubt that it is remarkably powerful. For example, when you put out a fake, like the Kerry/Fonda one.[2] And even like this missile one. You start putting it out there and saying, “Oh look, this picture? It’s a fake. This picture? It’s a fake.” But you know what people remember? They don’t remember, “It’s a fake.” They remember the picture. And there are psychology studies, when you tell people that information is incorrect, they forget that it is incorrect. They only remember the misinformation. They forget the tag associated with it. They did these great studies, especially with older people. They give them information about health, Medicare, Medicaid, that kind of stuff. And they say, “this information that you heard? It’s wrong.” And what ends up happening is, that information gets ingrained into their brains, and even if they are subsequently told it’s wrong, they end up believing it.[3] [4]
ERROL MORRIS: It occurred to me, just with respect to the missile photograph, that if the people who Photoshopped this photograph wanted to call additional attention to it, they could do no better than what they did.
HANY FARID: That’s exactly right. Look at how much attention is being brought to it. At the end of the day, even though they doctored the photograph, it shows that these guys still fired three missiles, and they sure brought a lot of attention to it.
ERROL MORRIS: The threat remains. What are we supposed to infer? It’s a fake, so there is no need to worry? The real threat is only 75 percent of what we thought. Three missiles instead of four.
HANY FARID: It raises a whole other level of information warfare, right? You intentionally put things out there just to know that the controversy in and off itself will help you make your point.
ERROL MORRIS: And since it is a version of chest thumping or saber rattling — whatever you want to call it — the thumping and the rattling linger on.
HANY FARID: Has there been a response from the Iranians?
ERROL MORRIS: A variety of different responses — from bellicose to reassuring. Ahmadinejad said that Iran had no intention of attacking Israel.[5]
HANY FARID: But no admission about doctoring the photograph?
ERROL MORRIS: No. Not that I’m aware of. But doctored photographs are the least of our worries. If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don’t need Photoshop. You don’t need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don’t need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption.
[The photographs presented by Colin Powell at the United Nations in 2003 provide several examples. Photographs that were used to justify a war. And yet, the actual photographs are low-res, muddy aerial surveillance photographs of buildings and vehicles on the ground in Iraq. I’m not an aerial intelligence expert. I could be looking at anything. It is the labels, the captions, and the surrounding text that turn the images from one thing into another.[6]
Powell was arguing that the Iraqis were doing something wrong, knew they were doing something wrong, and were trying to cover their tracks. Later, it was revealed that the captions were wrong. There was no evidence of chemical weapons and no evidence of concealment.
There is a larger point. I don’t know what these buildings were really used for. I don’t know whether they were used for chemical weapons at one time, and then transformed into something relatively innocuous, in order to hide the reality of what was going on from weapons inspectors. But I do know that the yellow captions influence how we see the pictures. “Chemical Munitions Bunker” is different from “Empty Warehouse” which is different from “International House of Pancakes.” The image remains the same but we see it differently.[7]
Change the yellow labels, change the caption and you change the meaning of the photographs. You don’t need Photoshop. That’s the disturbing part. Captions do the heavy lifting as far as deception is concerned. The pictures merely provide the window-dressing. The unending series of errors engendered by falsely captioned photographs are rarely remarked on. – E.M.]
HANY FARID: You are absolutely right; you don’t need Photoshop to editorialize. We can go back to Mao and Stalin and Castro and Mussolini, and all these guys. All the dictators doctored photographs in order to effectively change history. So why is this a big deal? Is it because of the power of visual imagery, the fact that it resonates so much? Maybe that will change with the next generation. Maybe this new generation will be thinking about images differently. There is a savviness about what technology can do. Kids now are growing up in digital age where they routinely see doctored images in their mailboxes, in the media, on television, and so on and so forth.
ERROL MORRIS: But, as we become more and more sophisticated about images — about how images are processed — haven’t we become more sophisticated about detecting fraud? Photoshop manipulations are relatively easy to detect. They fool the eye, but they don’t necessarily fool the expert.
HANY FARID: The answer is: yes and no. It depends on the image source. So, if we have the raw files[8], if we have the original footage from someone’s digital camera, you can’t fool us anymore. We have enough technology today where, given the camera, the original images that came off the camera, we can tell if you’ve manipulated them. If, however, you are talking about an image that has been cropped and reduced and compressed and posted on the web, then we might be able to do it, but there’s no guarantee. The task is decidedly harder because a lot of information has been thrown away. You’ve compressed the image; you’ve resized it. This is why all the Loch Ness monster and ghost images are always so tiny and grainy, because then you can’t see the signs of tampering. With low-res images it’s much harder to detect a fake. Definitely, when we have a high-res original image, we are much better at it.
[People often trust low-res images because they look more real. But of course they are not more real, just easier to fake. We look at picture of Nessie (the Loch Ness Monster). It’s grainy, fuzzy. It’s hard to make anything out. You never see a 10-megapixel photograph of Big Foot or the Abominable Snowman or the Loch Ness Monster. One explanation is: these monsters don’t exist. But if they did exist — so the thinking goes — they are probably unwilling to sit still for portraiture. The grainy images are proof of how elusive Nessie can be. This belief extends to documentary filmmaking, as well. If it’s badly shot, it’s more authentic. – E.M.]
ERROL MORRIS: Well, finding evidence that someone has used the Photoshop clone-tool is relatively easy, isn’t it, if you have a raw file in front of you as a comparison?
HANY FARID: Well, certainly if you have the original, but even without the original, we’re actually pretty good at detecting cloning. Now interestingly, in the Iranian missile image, I actually ran the clone detection software, and it did not detect it. Here’s the reason: they’re not perfect clones. They actually have been adjusted a little bit, and if you look carefully at the image, you will see this. There are two things going on. First of all, the image has been JPEG compressed, which changes the cloning a little bit, but we can still detect cloning in the present JPEG. But what happened is it was altered after it was cloned. Somebody went in and actually manipulated in small places to make it look less obvious. The Iranian photograph was done much more carefully and much more subtly. There were these four folds of smoke in the bottom right hand corner in one of the plumes. If they had actually adjusted that a little bit, which is what I do when I clone, people wouldn’t have seen it. That makes the fake even more impressive, because it wasn’t just copy, paste. We would have detected that. And frankly, if we didn’t have the photo with the third missile not launching, and somebody asked me what do you think, I would have said, “Well, I think it’s suspicious, but I’m not sure.”
ERROL MORRIS: But here’s a question. First, there was one picture. Then there were two. When did the second picture become available? Did the Iranians post both photographs, the cloned and the uncloned original? If I’m interested in deceiving you, and I have produced an altered photograph B based on photograph A, which has not been cloned, don’t I suppress A? Don’t I suppress the unaltered photograph?
HANY FARID: I don’t know where it [the three-missile photograph] came from.[9] Maybe there was just another photographer there. And if you look, it is not the original photograph that was manipulated. The photo with three missiles was taken just before, and from a slightly different vantage point. So I think what was happening was that there was another photographer and that image got released also, and that’s how we know that the third missile misfired. By the way, it’s not obvious, although everybody’s saying it is, that this is only a clone job. It could’ve been that that fourth missile fired, just at a later time, so that they tested it afterwards. It fired, they took a picture of it, and then they composited it, as opposed to cloned it, into the original picture. That also would explain why they’re not exact copies of each other. So I’m not exactly sure what happened.
ERROL MORRIS: If you believe that it could not have been simple cloning, or they went in and they altered a pixel here and there, to muddy the waters, can you really say that with certainty?
HANY FARID: The reason why we’re sure it was tampered with is because we have that other photograph. That’s why we know, right? That’s what really locks it in.
ERROL MORRIS: But how do you know that that other photograph hasn’t been altered?
HANY FARID: That’s a fair question. How do we know that that one’s not fake, as well?
ERROL MORRIS: Yes. There’s a remarkable story about the forging of the Hitler diaries. The forger was so prolific, he created so many forgeries — letters, watercolors, diaries, etc. — that handwriting analysts (charged with the task of authenticating the diaries) took writing examples done by the forger thinking they were genuine examples of Hitler’s handwriting and compared them to the diaries. They authenticated the diaries on that basis.[10] Often we make a comparison between something that we believe is real and something that we believe is fake. I guess the moral of the story is we should always consider the possibility that we may be comparing something fake with something else that is fake.
HANY FARID: It’s sort of like Rembrandt, right? His body of work has been shrinking for decades now, right? And so what’s considered to be his body of work is completely different now, cause he was faked so heavily. It’s a good question. The reason why we believe that the one with the four missiles is fake is that there is pretty strong, at least circumstantial, evidence that the cloning was there. The plumes of smoke look very, very similar. There are a lot of little pieces. But also, when you clone with a standard clone tool, there’s like a soft cloning, so it does a little bit of like alpha matting, so that it’s not a hard edge. And you see along the rocks, there’s definitely some funny business going on. Again, visually it’s not a certainty. But it certainly looks more suspicious.
ERROL MORRIS: But when we see something suspicious, aren’t we asking also asking the questions: What are they up to? Why are they doing this? Why are there three missiles in one photograph and four in another? What is going on here? What were they thinking? The simple answer: If my desire is to present a bellicose posture to the West, fine, clone a couple of those missiles. We know it’s a fake. But what are we supposed to infer from the photograph? Is it that these Iranians are so unscrupulous they will stop at nothing?
http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008...y-as-a-weapon/