“More real than reality”: American political images before the election
Just over 50 years ago, President Richard Nixon wondered whether photo of Kim Phuc, a nine-year-old Vietnamese girl whose body was burned by a staged napalm bomb. He speak to his chief of staff, HR Haldeman, “I wonder if that’s the fix” — what today might be called “fake news.” But given the credibility of the 1972 news photo, Nixon could not dismiss the horror that this AP photo Nick Ut evoked, even as it aroused resistance to the war.
“Napalm bothers everyone. You will see an image of a little girl with her clothes burned,” Haldeman said. “I wonder about that,” Nixon replied. The commander of US troops in South Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, also questioned the photo, accuse at one point the girl was burned in “a hibachi accident”, but contemporary news footage showed planes dropping napalm bombs. And witnesses – including others with cameras – were present the day Kim Phuc was seriously injured, scarring much of his body for life. The following year, President Nixon would withdraw the last American combat troops from Vietnam.
This year, the image of a young girl who appeared to be about the same age went viral. She was crying, alone on the boat, clutching a puppy and wearing a robe. life jacket. It generated millions of views on social media and sparked many responses, with many Republicans pointing to the image as a way to criticize the Biden administration’s response to the devastation caused by the storm. Helene. Although it was quickly pointed out that the image was probably artificial, created using artificial intelligence – and not actually a photograph – it continued to cause considerable emotion. . “This image is imprinted in my mind” commented Amy Kremer, a Republican National Committee member representing Georgia.
And even after widespread online doubts about its authenticity, Kremer confirm“I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter.” Her reason: “It is a symbol of the hurt and pain that people are going through.” For many people, there is a larger reality, a truth, that does not need confirmation. Rolling Stone titled an article about this image “Right-wingers heartbroken over photo of non-existent little girl.” The conversation between Nixon and Haldeman, if it took place today, would likely be much less cautious.
That is the nature of embracing the surreal—a larger-than-life, “realer than reality” representation of events—that we are confronted with on social media, on television, and in the candidates’ appearances in the run-up to this. election. Indeed, Kremer’s insistence that the authenticity of the photo of the girl and the puppy “doesn’t matter” is consistent with the sentiment the vice presidential candidate expressed to CNN. J.D. Vance, who, in defending his false claims about immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, declare: “If I had to create stories so that the American media would really pay attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I would do.”
See different images of the former president Donald Trump taken simultaneously by some photographer moments after the attempt on his life in July. “A bloody photo of Donald Trump with his fist raised and an American flag looming in the background is quickly emerging as a key image,” AP reported immediately after the assassination in Pennsylvania. Why? Article cited witty Patrick, a former photo editor at Time, The New York Times, And National Geographic, asserts that “It captures a series of complex details and emotions in a single still image — defiant raised fists, blood, agents screaming to push Trump off the stage, and officials. The most important thing is the flag. That’s what elevates the photo.” Other photos of Trump, surrounded by a group of Secret Service agents as he looked shaken and vulnerable, some without the flag as evidence, were not featured in the same way. These images fail to convey the bravery and defiance required of a hero, as one newspaper put it on the front page, “bloody but unbowed”—a description that might be more aptly applied to a comic book superhero.
The “important” image of the fist and flag resonates with other powerful previous photographs depicting Americans confronting and overcoming great challenges—the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima during World War II ( by AP’s Joe Rosenthal) and firefighters at work. the same thing just hours after the September 11 attacks in New York City (expressed most memorably by Thomas E. Franklin for the North Jersey newspaper Record)—and had Trump grazed by a bullet in a similar act of excessive heroism. In contrast, AP’s photos Ron Edmonds and others, of Ronald Reagan being pushed into a car by Secret Service agents after he was much more severely injured in an attempted assassination in 1981, are relatively on foot, showing the president being put into a car in an unusual way. What are the consequences of this photo of Trump being widely posted? “Already one of the most iconic photos in American history — and one that I suspect will push Donald Trump back to the White House,” the journalist wrote. Piers Morgan wrote on social media.
As for Trump, it was also a skillfully “considered” posture, one that the media-savvy politician with reality TV experience was well qualified to adopt at the time. Jason Farago will write IN New York Times, “Photos say, ‘I’m safe; I am strong,’ but they say stronger, ‘I know I must Look as if I were safe; I know I must Look as if I were strong.’ In other words, the power of photographs lies not in what they depict politically but in what they communicate political depictionssomething Mr. Trump seems to understand better than any other political figure of his time.… Mr. Trump has the instinct, in the midst of mortal danger, to see how things will turn out.
A more recent series of photos shows Trump handing out French fries to pre-selected supporters at a McDonald’s, while reveling in the ingenuity, making no attempt to connect with any of the moments. What important moment in American history? Instead, it makes clear the event’s ostentatious fakery. Here, the former president, despite being dramatic in a staged photo, can confirm“I now work 15 minutes more than Kamala” while trying to discredit her own past work experience, years ago, at another McDonald’s. The pretend work for the cameras was strategized as a way to negate the real work, never mind Trump’s decades-long history of favoring management, being tough on employees, and degrading employees. low employee contributions. There’s no need to even pretend to connect with reality anymore.
This disconnect between image and reality has been building in American politics for decades. While in 1960 John F. Kennedy famously won a televised debate with Richard Nixon, the more televised of the two, two decades later, Ronald Reagan, a former actor, would become president playing a horse-riding, coat-wearing cowboy. a ten gallon hat. In the race for the Republican nomination, the Republican Party chose “Dutch” Reagan—who had appeared in Western films such as Horse Road And Sante Fe Trail—on rival George HW Bush, a true war hero and veteran politician.
About two decades later, in 2004, this role was no longer needed. At that time, journalist Ron Suskind wrote IN New York Times Magazine, there has been a decline in the “fact-based community,” a phrase he attributed to an official in President George W. Bush’s administration who smeared critics of the administration’s policies as people who make fact-based judgments: “’The assistant said that guys like me ‘are in what we call the fact-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that the the solution emerges from your discerning study of discernible reality’. … ‘That’s not how the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—carefully, as you please—we’ll move again, creating other new realities that you can study too, and that’s how things will work out. go out. We are the actors of history…and you, all of you, will only study what we do.’”
Recently, I did something similar. I used an artificial intelligence system to create realistic images of never-before-seen events and people who never existed—spectators at the Nazi victory parade in Berlin in 1945, another parade in New York celebrating the return of troops after the end of the Vietnam War, Kamala Harris at the March on Washington in 1963 (she was born in 1964), etc. I saw myself as a canary in the coal mine, pushing the limits of imaging machines to see if they would allow me to distort the whole past and to what extent. At the same time, I determined whether I could still spot the difference between the composite images they created and the actual photos, something I usually can’t do, despite working over 50 years in the field of photography. Although I’ve recently noticed an increasing disapproval of creating nude images in the system I currently use, there are fewer restrictions and sometimes even incentives against creating nude images. creating images that covertly distort important situations and events.
These types of realistic images reduce our grasp of reality and consequences. The integrity of the photograph as the arbiter of what happened – such as the photo of Kim Phuc in Vietnam – is undermined in many ways, including by the companies that produced the photo. cell phone camera is said to be responsible for over 90% of the photos currently being taken. In an interview in Stringed magazine, Isaac Reynolds, team project manager for Google’s Pixel Camera, debate that today’s photographer may ignore photographic evidence in pursuit of a representation that is “authentic to your memory and to the broader context, but may not be authentic to a particular millisecond ”. More worryingly, Patrick Chomet, Samsung’s head of customer experience recently suggested in an interview with TechRadar that “actually, there is no such thing as a real image. As soon as you have a sensor to capture something, you reproduce [what you’re seeing]and it doesn’t make any sense. There is no real photo.… You can try to identify a real photo by saying, ‘I took that photo,’ but if you use AI to optimize zoom, autofocus, scene—is it real? Or is it all filters? There are no real pictures, stop it.”
