05 January 2013

Disagreeing with South Florida Sun Sentinel

A rather funny story and a rather imprecise coverage of it by a newspaper:

The official portrait of Democratic women sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives lacked four members, so it was altered and they were inserted.
I am afraid I cannot see a great harm done to the cause of historical accuracy in this case, especially since:
A spokesman for Pelosi cautioned news organizations the portrait had been altered, the media website Poynter said.
However, some people (I can make an educated guess about their political allegiance, but wouldn't) were seriously irked:
Among the members of Congress whose picture was inserted was Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, D-Fla., and Friday the South Florida Sun Sentinel referred to the photographic magic as "a solution worthy of Stalinist Russia: Photoshopping in the missing four."
I feel I cannot pass over this misinterpretation of recorded history. Dear Sentinel: during Stalin's times the photographic magic was used mostly to "photoshop" people out of existing pictures. As they say in Odessa: two big differences there...

P.S. Another related question is of more interest to me. Knowing how sensitive are people of female persuasion to their pictures being published - how long did the approval of the photograph take?

2 comments:

Shaun Downey said...

Wow hardly the most outrageous use of photo manipulation....



As you say Stalin seemed to be more interested in deleting people from photos than inserting. Going off on a tangent it made me think of the start of a Kundera novel where after a urge a leading communist is airbrushed from a photo leaving nothing but his fur cap sitting proud on the head of Klement Gottwald

SnoopyTheGoon said...

Exactly.