Digital Tampering in the Media, Politics and Law

Hany Farid:

Photography lost its innocence many years ago. In as early as the 1930s, shortly after the first commercially available camera was introduced, Stalin had his enemies 'air-brushed' out of photographs. With the advent of high-resolution digital cameras, powerful personal computers and sophisticated photo-editing software, the manipulation of digital images is becoming more common. Here, I have collected some examples of digital tampering in the media, politics, and the law.

The examples are stunning, well worth a look.

Fragments of Israel, Assembled Into a Whole

From The New York Times:

“What are we waiting for in Israel, all of us? A moment of liberation from this burden that we are living under. And it doesn’t seem to be coming anytime soon. I see these two pictures as combining anticipation and desperation.”

That ambiguity keeps us looking, along with the eerie sense that we are watching biblical history unfolding in modern garb.

New Yorkers will get a glimpse of this fragmented and multilayered reality when “Barry Frydlender: Place and Time,” a show of 10 recent works, opens Thursday at the Museum of Modern Art.