Across Weirdish Wild Space

BoingBoing pointed to a great blog entry today from Errol Morris, the director of the amazing documentary The Fog of War (which you should really see if you haven’t. It did win an Oscar you know.).

Besides Powell’s now-infamous WMD photos of non-existent chemical weapons facilities that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq, it also covers the photoshopped Iranian missiles photo that ran across a number of US newspapers (the NYT article even has my very favourite mock shot of the Iranian missile launch photos, the godzilla in the midst of the launch field).

From a course I took back in Canada on Anthropology and the Image (fascinating by the way and well worth the time and effort – note now that the course is called Visual Ethnography), I know that photography as a political weapon, even as a cultural weapon, especially with reference to people like the Navajo and Africans, was amazingly devastating in associating a set of negative attributes with a culture, but the amazing thing in the modern era (perhaps because of the ubiquity of photographs in general), is the commonplace manipulation of them, or their captioning to achieve desired political ends, whether those be supporting invasion, instilling fear or misdirecting attention. Got to be a good book or documentary in there somewhere.

But a great read. Hopefully, Morris is working on another fab documentary along these lines.

The interesting thing though, is that the fodder here for activists of all stripes, to increasingly draw attention to disinformation and political propaganda by mocking these things. For example, Worth1000-esque photoshopping contests coordinated with a photosstream on Flickr and just tagged with an appropriately complex tag to make sure interesting photos get surfaced.

via BoingBoing