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Politics of Photoshop: 15 Shady Edits for Political Purposes

Delana — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 17:00:45 +0000

Today, Photoshop and other photo editing tools are used extensively for everything from digitally slimming swimsuit models to retouching school photographs in an effort to erase the memories of adolescent acne. But some photo retouching has a rather more nefarious purpose: swaying viewers to one side or the other of a political debate. This practice is not a strictly modern one, though: people have been altering photographs for political purposes almost since the day photographs were invented. These political photo hacks date all the way back to the 19th century and continue up through the present day…because no one ever accused politicians (or their staff, followers or enemies) of being too honest.

Honest Abe’s Not-So-Honest Pose

(images via: Gajitz)

Abraham Lincoln is one of the most celebrated former American presidents, and this stately portrait of him standing in a rather regal pose has graced countless classrooms. But the truth is that Lincoln never posed for this picture; rather, it is Abe’s head (from a less-regal seated portrait) pasted onto the body of Southern politician John Calhoun. If you look very closely, you can see that the words on the papers have been changed from “the sovereignty of the states,” “strict constitution,” and “free trade” in the Calhoun photo to “union,” “constitution,” and “proclamation of freedom” in Lincoln’s.

Grant’s Grand Battle Scene

(images via: Gajitz)

Another iconic American history photograph is this one of General Ulysses S. Grant on horseback before his troops in City Point, Virginia during the Civil War. It’s a wonderful and oft-circulated piece of history…and it’s also a total fabrication. The portrait, bottom, is actually a composite of the three images above it: General Grant’s head on the body (and horse) of General Alexander McCook with a backdrop of a battle at Fisher’s Hill, Virginia.

Majestic Mussolini

(images via: Dartmouth)

In this 1942 portrait of Benito Mussolini, the horse handler holding the steed’s reins was thought to detract from the power and authority that the Italian Fascist wanted to portray. Therefore, Mussolini had him summarily dismissed from the photo after the fact.

Breaking Up is Hard to Do

(images via: Dartmouth)

It’s rough falling out of favor with a political leader – particularly one who employs skilled photo editors to erase all photographic evidence of enemies’ existence. In all of these photos, a former friend, colleague or adviser was deemed unsavory after the photos were taken and subsequently edited out of the images. Top: a commissar is removed from a photo where he once walked alongside Josef Stalin. Middle: once Po Ku fell out of favor with Mao Zedong, Mao had him erased from this photograph. Bottom: Joseph Goebbels was one of Hitler’s closest advisers and a high-ranking Nazi official. Although his career experienced ups and downs, he never truly fell out of favor with Hitler, which is why it is puzzling that he was removed from this 1937 photograph.

(images via: Museum of Hoaxes, Dartmouth)

Likewise, Leon Trotsky (along with two other men) and Carlos Franqui suffered photographic deaths after publicly opposing the policies of Josef Stalin and Fidel Castro, respectively.

Grim Tydings

(images via: Museum of Hoaxes)

In 1950, with America in the midst of the Cold War and anti-Communist sentiment running hot, this apparent meeting between Senator Millard Tydings and Earl Browder, the head of the American Communist Party, was instrumental in Tydings’ unsuccessful senate bid. It was a fake cooked up by the staff of Senator Joseph McCarthy after Tydings insisted that the American government was not swarming with closet Communists, contrary to what McCarthy alleged. Even though the photo was admitted as a fake, Tydings lost his 1950 election and his made-up Communist ties were thought to be at least partly to blame.

Election Hijinks

(images via: Museum of Hoaxes)

(image via: Snopes)

During the 2004 presidential election, pictures surfaced of both George W. Bush and John Kerry in compromising positions. Bush was depicted as stupid and child-like, while Kerry was shown keeping company with unsavory characters or participating in activities that encouraged Americans to question his personal beliefs. Among the most memorable: the top picture apparently shows G.W. Bush reading a children’s book upside down, but it was clearly altered from the original image, show to the right. John Kerry was reported to have shared a podium with Jane Fonda at an anti-Vietnam war rally, but the images was later revealed to be a composite of two photographs from two separate events. Kerry was also reported to have spent time with Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, as evidenced by this photo…a photo which was soon uncovered as a fake.

(images via: Dartmouth)

(images via: Museum of Hoaxes)

The 2008 election was filled with just as much photo trickery. The infamous Sarah Palin photo above, in which the former Governor of Alaska poses in an American flag bikini with a large gun, quickly spread all around the world. It was, however, just as quickly proven to be a fake. Also a topic of discussion during the election was Barack Obama’s pledge to quit smoking, which has proven somewhat troublesome for the politician. This photo of the president with a cigarette in his mouth, however, is not a photographer’s lucky catch of a slip of willpower; it was created by an anonymous internet prankster.

Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right

(images via: Stinky Journalism)

In 2009, the director of Spain’s National Intelligence Center, Alberto Saiz, was accused of spending government money on lavish international fishing and hunting vacations. To disprove his presence on a certain fishing trip, Saiz released the bottom photograph above which was supposed to show that he was not present on the fishing boat. The only problem is that when his staff removed Saiz’s head from the photo, they replaced it with that of the man standing just a few feet away from Saiz…in the same photograph.

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Photoshop Fail: 14 More Hilarious Blunders and Goofs

No matter how often professional Photoshop screw-ups are pointed out to a very amused world, more keep cropping up in magazines, websites and even pizza boxes. Click Here to Read More »»

Political Animal: The Ever-Evolving Republican Elephant Logo

Since the ever-evolving Republican Elephant logo first appeared on November 7, 1874, its red, white and blue skin has become a fixture of the political landscape. 2 Comments - Click Here to Read More »»

Faux Photoshop: 15 Incredible Images That Look Altered but Aren’t

Some images just seem too incredible to be real, but not every jaw-dropping photo you've seen on the internet is Photoshopped. 67 Comments - Click Here to Read More »»

24 Tales of Ghost Towns and Abandoned Cities

Urbanist — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 19:41:11 +0000

What in the world could cause an entire city to be abandoned? Some become unlivable due to environmental disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis to nuclear meltdowns (as with Pripyat, shown below). Others become the center of military activity and remain contested and uninhabited as a result – or are simply left as memorials to the terrible events that took place in them. Still others are simply deserted when they outlive their usefulness as trade outposts or mining towns.

This Halloween, forget the plastic cape and cheesy costume. Why not find and explore the real relics and strange structures of an actual ghost town or abandoned city instead? From Azerbaijan to Japan, Italy to Siberia and Cyprus to China, here are twenty-four haunting real-life ghost villages, towns and cities from around the world. Click below to learn more:

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7 (More) Abandoned Wonders of the Former Soviet Union: From Mining Towns to Oil Rig Cities

The former Soviet Union has a complicated history that is told in part through some of its deserted infrastructure, from submarine bases to missile silos and more. 41 Comments - Click Here to Read More »»

12 Abandoned Houses, Homes and Ghost Towns

Houses, neighborhoods, and entire towns are abandoned for a number of reasons. However they become abandoned, these areas can be peaceful and haunting to visit. 10 Comments - Click Here to Read More »»

Abandoned Cities, Towns and Buildings: 7 More Deserted Wonders of the Modern World

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10 Amazing Light Graffiti Artists and Photographers: From Light Writing to Extreme Exposures

Steph — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:10:29 +0000

(Check out our complete collection of 100+ Works of Creative and Geeky Art and Graffiti.)

Light graffiti, also known as light painting, takes what you think you know about graffiti and turns it on its head. This ephemeral approach to art and expression uses the movement of light to create incredible images and is created on the streets, in nature, and in studios by artists whose creative impulses transcend traditional media. Unlike projection bombing, light graffiti is sometimes produced as performance art, and sometimes just to capture it with photography and video, but either way it makes for some incredible viewing. These ten artists producing light graffiti and light painting represent some of the most amazing talent in a growing (and increasingly strange) field of art.

Michael Bosanko

Michael Bosanko is a photographer who’s taken on light painting in a series called “We Come in Peace”, in which figures made of light seem to interact with their surroundings in a way that’s comical, fun and highly engaging. The series features giant spiders crawling down a highway, “alien” rocks gathering around a central “spaceship”, a light figure skateboarding on a ramp and another hitchhiking on the side of a road.

Patrick Rochon

Patrick Rochon creates stunning images by moving light through various media and capturing the movement with photography and video. Patrick’s light painting is unique even among a field of very innovative artists, using lasers to illuminate his subjects in ways that create an eerie, otherwordly feel in the finished portraits. Patrick has also taken light painting to a whole new level by building costumes of lights and performing light painting on a giant screen to create a unique visual experience.

LICHTFAKTOR

The German group Lichtfaktor has produced some of the best-known light graffiti, transforming everyday objects like trash cans, phone booths and street signs into live creatures that wave their arms around and seem to spring forth from the street. Comprised of Marcel Panne, David L’pschen and Tim Fehske, Lichtfaktor combines talents like graphic design, video mixing and photography to craft series of images and videos for companies like Absolut Vodka, Audi, Sprint and Playstation.

Cenci Goepel and Jens Warnecke

German duo Cenci Goepel and Jens Warnecke create stark imagery that brings a ghostly quality to the beauty of nature, turning striking natural settings into backdrops for glowing organic forms made of moving light. Their subtle use of light painting in deserts, canyons, forests and snow-covered fjords makes the illuminated forms seem to blend in with their backgrounds in a way that brings to mind alien landscapes on some far away planet.

Eric Staller

Eric Staller‘s light drawings, created between 1976 and 1980 in New York City, give the viewer a whole new look at the Big Apple. These examples of light graffiti were created using a long exposure with a variety of light sources, sometimes in the form of 3-dimensional lit installations. His photographs seem to give the light itself a life of its own, as it travels through the city creating whimsical shapes down its streets and walkways.

Ryan Warnberg and Michelle McSwain (MRI)

Queens, NY light painters Ryan Warnberg and Michelle McSwain are collectively known as MRI, a group that creates light paintings for hire. MRI’s fun brand of light painting can be commissioned for parties, ad campaigns and special events, and they bring all of their own equipment. MRI creates “kaleidoscopic” images that invoke old portraits of religious figures, but with a decidedly modern twist.

Sola

Sola is a UK photographer whose experiments with the flow, form and movement of light are captured in two series, “Embro” and “Solid Trace”. Embro, defined by the artist as “Echoes of the organic world translated into a synthetic language”, seems to explore how light captured in a photograph can seem just as organic as anything else around us. “Solid Trace”, which the artist calls “An exploration of movement and form in contrastingly stark environments” portrays vibrant swirls of colored light on urban backdrops.

Alan Jaras

Alan Jaras creates his stunning images by passing streams of light through molded and textured plastic, for a “refracted” effect that is unlike any other light painter’s work. Colored dyes are added to the plastic shape, and the shape is placed in front of the camera in lieu of a lens to be directly captured on 35mm film for an incredibly unique and organic result.

Dean Chamberlain

Dean Chamberlain takes portraiture to new heights with his pioneering light painting technique, which he developed in 1977. Renowned for his “Psychedelic Pioneers” series among other work, Chamberlain creates these images using extremely long exposures in sessions that can last as long as five hours. He uses a flashlight and colored gels to illuminate each individual element in a composition.

Toby Keller

Toby Keller of Burn Blue Photography in Design has created a series of light painting images in which the free-flowing forms of light seem to have no rhyme or reason – and they don’t have to. Keller takes what would already be beautiful nature photography and makes it seem to crackle with kinetic energy as ribbons of glowing light swirl around groups of rocks by the sea. For more great light art from skilled graffiti artists check out CultCase and DarkRoastedBlend

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10 of the World’s Most Amazing 3D Street Artists: From Sidewalk Sketches to Awesome Wall Murals

Urbanist — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 15:54:04 +0000

(Check out our complete collection of 100+ Works of Creative and Geeky Art and Graffiti.)

3D graffiti, whether it’s in chalk or paint, on walls or the street, represents a new way of combining the mastery of Renaissance art techniques with the gritty, ephemeral qualities of amazing street art. These 3D street artists gives graffiti a whole new meaning – one that departs from the conventional interpretation of graffiti as vandalism in the form of images and letters scrawled on public property. Artists like Kurt Wenner, Eduardo Relero and Tracy Lee Stum create street art that is so incredible it is almost impossible to pass by without being sucked in to the worlds they create on asphalt and concrete surfaces.

Kurt Wenner

Kurt Wenner‘s ability to transform Renaissance classicism into 3D street art is unparalleled and has made him the top anamorphic street painting artist of our time. Kurt aims to “reinvent classicism for a new age”, bringing his talent for realism to the streets, literally, having invented a pictorial geometry that corrects the specific distortion caused by viewing his street paintings at an oblique angle. A former NASA illustrator, Kurt has had his work featured in a lengthy list of articles, television features, ads, and documentaries.

Edgar Muller & Manfred Stader

Edgar Muller and Manfred Stader are a German team of street painters. Much of their work is in the 3D anamorphic style, but both of them often create traditional street paintings in a style that mimics the detail and realism of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Their background in realism gives them an incredible advantage as anamorphic street painters, as evidenced in their “River Street” work and the paintings above. Stader and Mueller have won many street painting competitions, and have taught street painting at universities.

Julian Beever

Julian Beever’s world-renowned sidewalk chalk drawings have been a viral hit all over the internet, and it’s easy to see why: he’s a master of the anamorphic technique, which he’s been perfecting since the mid 1990s. Each of Julian’s creations typically take a full day to complete, and by the next day they’re just a memory, washed away by rain or walked upon by pedestrians. The English artist has been given the nickname “The Pavement Picasso”, and he continues to work all over the world.

Tracy Lee Stum

Tracy Lee Stum is widely considered to be one of today’s finest street painters. She has traveled the world to be a featured artist in many festivals and events, and she currently holds the Guinness World Record for the largest street painting by an individual, which she completed in 2006. Tracy’s work contains many themes, from Biblical to exotic to the mundane.

Eduardo Relero

Eduardo Relero is a street artist working primarily in Spain. His fanciful illustrative style looks like storybook pages come to life, and indeed each of his anamorphic sidewalk chalk drawings seems to have a story behind it.

Rod Tryon

Rod Tryon has been adorning the streets of the world with his chalk drawings for more than 20 years, and was first inspired to try anamorphic designs in 1996. Of his paintings, Rod says “Entertaining the audience by creating an image that looks like it is coming up out of the street, or the impression of a hole opening up in the asphalt in front of you, is a special treat for the artist. Seeing crowds react to his 3-D pastel images, bring great joy to both the artist and onlookers.”

Greg Brown

The work of Greg Brown isn’t meant to be accessible. His huge murals seem to jump out at the viewer, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy to interpret, and that’s how he likes it. Greg’s murals vary dramatically in style and content from one to another, due to the intense collaborative process he takes on with each client. They range from Dali-esque surrealism to classic trompe leil, with subjects including everything from construction equipment to miniature ships.

Eric Grohe

Eric Grohe was a professional graphic designer and illustrator for decades before beginning work on his renowned trompe leil murals. Eric’s murals appear to jump off of the surfaces that he paints on, and they grace walls all over the United States and the World, from Seattle Washington to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Eric’s work reflects a patriotic all-American theme, and his depictions of scenes such as football games and picturesque towns have turned blank walls into works of art.

Daim

Daim is a German graffiti artist who first started spraying in 1989 and hasn’t stopped since. Daim has become one of the most sought-after graffiti artists in the world, and has even appeared in the Guinness Book of World Records for spraying the highest graffiti in the world. The only “traditional” graffiti artist on our list, Daim creates 3D art on interior and exterior walls, canvas and vehicles and also works in animation and sculpture.

Previously: 3 Amazing 3D Artists

And: 3D Architectural Illusions

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7 Brilliant Building Conversion Projects: Superb Examples of Architectural Adaptive Reuse

Urbanist — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:05:02 +0000

(Check out our complete collection of 70 Works of Recycled Art and Design.)

Adaptive reuse used to be a tactic of necessity – people didn’t have the time, energy or money to build something new so they made the best with what they had. Today it is a way to stand out, make a statement, go bold and try something completely different. From airplanes, chapels and garages turned into houses to airplane hangers turned into tropical rain forest resorts, the possibilities are essentially endless. Know of other recycled design or amazing architecture projects? Be sure to list them in the comments below!

This Dutch chapel-turned-apartment very clearly shows its origins as a stunning chapel, yet is somehow also compellingly sleek, modern and ultimately residential (if spacious). The Dutch team of ZECC Architecten split this structure into two stories and the stained glass windows, rough-hewn stonework around the entryway and even the gigantic old church organ (wood, pipes and all) were retained while more modern furniture and architectural interventions were added and spliced to create unique visual juxtapositions. The net effect? Something far more austere than the original construction but ultimately also more home-like and modern.

What could be better than an amazing house made out of an airplane? A cheap one. The plane itself cost just $2000, though moving it cost $4000 and renovating it for habitation took another $24000 – but that’s still just $30000 for a truly amazing and unique home. The original airplane fold-down stairs were kept and are operated by a garage door opener and one of the original airplane restrooms still works as it always did. And the cockpit suspended over the lake below? Her own personal jacuzzi of course.

The Tate Modern Museum is a strange site on the London skyline – a contemporary art museum housed in the shell of a former power station. Internationally known for their creative use of materials and other adaptive reuse projects, architects Herzog and de Meuron made a conscious choice only to hint at the ultra-modern interior from the outside of the building. The 5-story Turbine Hall that once house the generators of the station now features gigantic works of specially-commissioned contemporary art by premiere artists from around the world.

The Villa de Murph in Atlanta is perhaps the most homely and unlikely looking building to ever be converted into an architecture studio and residence by two ingenious designers. The result is both a stunningly attractive live/work space and an amazing portfolio piece to show potential clients what these architects can achieve with even the most unlikely of locations and structures. Property never comes cheap so when this couple saw this sad structure at $40,000 the price as about as right as it could be. Rather than tear it all down and start anew, however, the designers saw amazing adaptive reuse potential in a building that most people would have wrecked the moment they bought it.

The Hedmark Museum in Norway sits on a site with an amazing history of structures – pieces of each of which are still intact today. It has parts of a Romanesque cathedral that was later converted to the Gothic style with building elements dating back to the 1500s. Rather than simply leaving these uncovered ruins to weather or putting them in an inaccessible box, however, architect Sverre Fehn chose to expose and celebrate these aged architectural elements and bring visitors right up through them. He chose mostly light-weight materials like wood and glass to contrast with the aged stonework and create a clear visual separation of old and new in the process. The result is a compelling contrast of time and place.

A garage is probably the most ubiquitous building type you never thought to turn into a house. It might sound like a small project for an adventurous resident of Portland, Oregon, but the city was none-to-pleased with granting permission to for this industrious adaptive reuse design. Once permission was granted, however, the architect clearly had an interesting challenge to make an uninteresting building cozy, functional and somewhat unusual in its appearance. Clever devices like split stairs and an angled front entry make the small space work on a practical level as well as an aesthetic one.

The Tropical Islands Resort is the result of the creative adaptive reuse of an old airplane hanger into the world’s biggest indoor tropical pool complex and water park. The hanger, located near Berlin, is 1000 feet long, 600 feet wide and three hundred feet high and is completely unencumbered by interior structural elements – it is essentially one gigantic interior space. The place contains everything one would expect on a tropical island: artificial sun and rain forests, beaches and palm trees and (somewhat kitchy to be sure) even fake bird recording to simulate the experience of actually vacationing in the tropics.