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September 29, 2005
How to Lie With Photography
Posted by Dave Blount at September 29, 2005 1:06 PM
The key is not what the photograph says, but what you make sure it does not say. Zombie demonstrates how it's done by the pros at the San Francisco Chronicle.
Say you're a photojournalist of the useful idiot variety and you come across a communist stage-managing some ghetto riffraff to pose with obscene placards and Palestinian flags in order to express their hostility toward Western Civilization. The communist is way too far out there to understand or even care that the scene she has composed will frighten and/or disgust normal people; if she weren't, she wouldn't be walking around in a shirt representing the flag of the totalitarian regime that brought hell to Earth in Vietnam.
The useful idiot photojournalist's task is to convert this scene into something that can be sold to people who shower on a regular basis. Bridging the gap between pompous, phony liberal elitists and the barely human barbarians they champion in opposition to their own society is a crucial task of mainstream media propagandists. Failure to perform this task effectively could result in moonbattery being laughed out of existence.
Here's a shot that takes in the whole scene (please excuse the obscenities; not to worry, they will be edited out):
Even most Democrats would cross the street — if not move to suburbia — to avoid this kind of sociopathic lowlife. But notice the girl in center — if you just zoom in on her, and cut out everything else, the bandana over her face loses its context, so that it seems almost more cute than sinister, just as a little kid dressed up as a pirate for Halloween would evoke none of the dread of a real-life cutthroat buccaneer.
So here's how the Chronicle presented the scene to its readers:
Nice work, huh? Images often go right to our subconscious, bypassing the usual critical filters as if they were raw experience. One properly cropped picture is worth a thousand words of frenzied editorial page bloviations. You have to hand it to the mainstream media: they may not know what they're doing, but they know how to do it.
Thanks to Debris Trail at Celestial Junk Blog for the tip.
