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	<title>Fauxtography</title>
	<link>https://lyingwithphotographs.com</link>
	<description>Fauxtography</description>
	<pubDate>Sun, 14 Nov 2021 23:44:08 +0000</pubDate>
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		<title>Home</title>
				
		<link>https://lyingwithphotographs.com/Home</link>

		<pubDate>Wed, 22 Sep 2021 17:20:34 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Fauxtography</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://lyingwithphotographs.com/Home</guid>

		<description>

&#60;img width="1524" height="2000" width_o="1524" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/92e0f8ed2be29c9c516a7415e7773ac2b95d925229b3b7bf5a5eb086ba74e36a/1.2.1-Manipulated-Sedated-MGM-lion-1a.jpg" data-mid="123772095" border="0" data-scale="92" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/92e0f8ed2be29c9c516a7415e7773ac2b95d925229b3b7bf5a5eb086ba74e36a/1.2.1-Manipulated-Sedated-MGM-lion-1a.jpg" /&#62;

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	<item>
		<title>FAUXTOGRAPHY </title>
				
		<link>https://lyingwithphotographs.com/FAUXTOGRAPHY</link>

		<pubDate>Mon, 27 Sep 2021 20:59:54 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Fauxtography</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://lyingwithphotographs.com/FAUXTOGRAPHY</guid>

		<description>FAUXTOGRAPHYLying with Photographs: An Analytical Framework
&#38;nbsp;
Lies are ever-present in human affairs, a tidal flow that rises and falls. Recently, lies have been at flood stage and photographs are central to the surge. 

Statements, strings of words, are readily seen as assertions, claims. Photographs, on the other hand, are presumed to be a form of evidence. In Susan Sontag’s phrase, we assume photographs are “directly stenciled off the real.” Consequently, photographs, even dubious ones, carry credence in a way that words do not. Moreover, writes theorist Lev Manovich, “the reason we think that computer graphics technology has succeeded in faking reality is that we, over the course of the last hundred and fifty years, have come to accept the image of photography and film as reality.” For these main reasons and scores of lesser ones, photographs are ideal vehicles for lies.

We have entered what may be the golden age of lying, and photographs are a key tool. Therefore, and with some urgency, this project undertakes a detailed dissection of the methods and modes of photographic lying. Our analytic framework has the same goals as any scientific taxonomy: analysis, understanding, even liberation. 

Our taxonomy consists of seven groups of photographic lies. They are: Manipulated, Manufactured, Recontextualized, Timeshifted, Extracted, Mirrored, and Denied. We offer a short description of each and illustrate each of the seven categories with “type specimens.” Paradoxically, we seek truths about lying. 

Photographs can be self-contained lies or they can buttress larger structures of deceit. Ultimately and dangerously, people assemble them to create fully-formed alternate realities. We become little gods of separate worlds. This is lonely and dangerous, socially corrosive and increasingly common. It also dovetails nicely with a national epidemic of selfishness.

Not much is required for photographs to deceive—liars willing to lie and people eager to believe them. Both seem in ample supply. The internet swarms with hustlers and every hustler has his mark. Additionally, images are restless. The internet untethers photos from the facts of their origin and supercharges image delivery with near-instantaneous global reach and echo chamber amplification. 

In our time, a photographic lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still rebooting its server. “On the internet,” comments photohistorian Susie Linfield, “all photographs are equal: including doctored, manipulated, or constructed photographs, and those without any meaningful—or with entirely false— contexts.” All the world is a screen and lies feel like its future. The problematic end point is not just an ecosystem of lies but a populace accustomed to the constant release of ever-evolving lies. The result: a fog of deception dense enough to blur vision itself. Our culture claims to see everything but sees nothing at all with certainty or trust. UCR ARTS: California Museum of Photography is the photography museum of the University of California. Founded in 1973, the museum creates exhibitions concerned with the intersection of photography, new imaging, and society. With more than 500,000 objects, it holds one of the major photography collections in the United States. The museum serves a diverse California, U.S. and international audience with research, exhibitions, education, performance, programming, and publications.Learn more about UCR ARTS at ucrarts.ucr.edu</description>
		
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	<item>
		<title>Sources for the Specimens</title>
				
		<link>https://lyingwithphotographs.com/Sources-for-the-Specimens</link>

		<pubDate>Sun, 14 Nov 2021 23:44:08 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Fauxtography</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://lyingwithphotographs.com/Sources-for-the-Specimens</guid>

		<description>Sources for the Specimens&#38;nbsp;

Let’s be clear: we have not mined previously unseen, undiscovered specimens. No digging is required. The internet is thick with photographic fictions—together with accompanying debates, debunkings, declarations and defenses—and this is precisely the point. Falsehoods are ubiquitous. We do not need new examples, we need analysis.

Each of our seven categories, Manipulated, Manufactured, Recontextualized, Timeshifted, Extracted, Mirrored, and&#38;nbsp;Denied, is illuminated by selected “type specimens,” sterling examples collected from across the internet. In biology and the earth sciences, type specimens have two qualities: they are excellent examples and they are also, almost uniformly, collected early and preserved in an important permanent collection, precisely like our representative cases. (Here’s an illustrative example from biology: Cryptosporidium parvum. C. parvum, as it is commonly known is parasitic on humans, not unlike social media. In fact, in developed countries, it is arguably the most important waterborne pathogen. This protozoan species was first collected in 1912 by the “large and kindly” Harvard physician and parasitologist Ernest Edward Tyzzer who extracted the single-celled animals from the gastric glands of laboratory mice. Tyzzer placed his C. parvum examples, illustrations, and descriptions in the Registry of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology which still holds them as the type specimens for this parasite.)

Our collected type specimen photographs, for all their occasional charm and polish, are not high art (a marginal practice of elites); they are scruffy and active, woven into the fabric of life. They stay out of galleries. They steer clear of fine art precincts where images feel like taxidermy: silent, crafted to imitate life, yet somehow still formulaic, glassy-eyed, and static. Instead, our photographs roll up their sleeves, range into the world’s darkness, and get busy pounding triangular pegs into round holes. These photographs are pure image: active, wheels on the ground, unhindered by artiness.

Online photographic lies, like flash flood debris, cover everything. They are so abundant that hundreds of institutions and websites have emerged to sift and search, to separate fact from fiction. Our type specimens are chipped out of the strata uncovered by these sleuths, detectives, and debunkers. For further exploration, here are a few websites among many.

Agence France-Presse Fact Check
https://factcheck.afp.com/
BBC News – Reality Check
https://www.bbc.com/news/reality_check
C4 News FactCheck (UK)
https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck
Climate Feedback
https://climatefeedback.org/
FactCheck.org (Annenberg Public Policy Center)
https://www.factcheck.org/
Factly
https://factly.in/
Full Fact
https://fullfact.org/
HoaxEye
https://hoaxeye.com/
The New York Times – Fact Check
https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/fact-checks
Politifact
https://www.politifact.com/
Real Clear Politics – Fact Check Review
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/fact_check_review/

Reuters Fact Check
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology ABC Fact Check
https://www.abc.net.au/news/factcheck/
Snopes
https://www.snopes.com/
Truth or Fiction
https://www.truthorfiction.com/
USA Today Fact Check
https://www.usatoday.com/news/factcheck/
The Washington Post Fact Checker
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/</description>
		
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	<item>
		<title>Mongrels and Crossbreeds</title>
				
		<link>https://lyingwithphotographs.com/Mongrels-and-Crossbreeds</link>

		<pubDate>Sun, 14 Nov 2021 22:57:39 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Fauxtography</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://lyingwithphotographs.com/Mongrels-and-Crossbreeds</guid>

		<description>Mongrels and Crossbreeds


Some of our seven categories feature familiar shapes, others exotic. Some photographic lies are superabundant, others relatively rare. But there are many mongrels, fusions, and subspecies and their shameless interbreeding produces marvelous forms and riotous profusion. Hybrids abound.

Lies are inherently impure, almost always adulterated, tainted, debased. Liars will lie in whatever ways serve persuasion, so many of our examples are complex tinctures—subtle combinations in suspension. Journalism presents several sides to each story; the internet projects a dizzingly undifferentiated kaleidoscope. It’s a survival-of-the-fittest system of likes and reposts, shares and forwards. The most potent forms thrive, multiply, take wing. Lies travel the world like flights of birds. In a kind of reverse Darwinism, the most appealingly malformed, the most picturesquely putrescent prevail. It is no accident in this malignant biome that triumphant photographs are admiringly called viral. 

These images fascinate us because they are both true and false depending on the context. They oscillate between fact and fiction, both and neither. Some things, Hemingway wrote, are “true at first and a lie by noon.” This is not unlike other photographs, but these are more evidently ambiguous, uncertain, unstable. All of which underlines a question which has been a question all along: photography’s dubious status as document, as evidence.

In the end, no matter their source or shape, photographs take on meaning only in interaction with humans. “Photographs are not ideas,” said Jean Paul Sartre. “They give us ideas.” Photographs are also not facts. They are mental space. It is in the jungle of human belief that photographic lies form their splendid, tangled ecosystem. </description>
		
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	<item>
		<title>Philosophical Digression on the Nature of Lies</title>
				
		<link>https://lyingwithphotographs.com/Philosophical-Digression-on-the-Nature-of-Lies</link>

		<pubDate>Sun, 14 Nov 2021 22:59:17 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Fauxtography</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://lyingwithphotographs.com/Philosophical-Digression-on-the-Nature-of-Lies</guid>

		<description>Philosophical Digression on the Nature of Lies
Examining lies trespasses on the realm of philosophy. This is not our quest and can be tedious. Nonetheless, we need to split several philosophical hairs. 

First, the inverse of a lie is not truth. Transpose a lie and you may find just another lie. Beyond that, truth is a more elusive quality: deeper, more difficult to locate, a rarer condition. Furthermore, much ink and anguish has been expended on the relationship between photography and truth. Despite an obvious abundance, few have looked at photographic lies and their mechanisms. For these reasons, truth, even with a small ‘t’, is outside the scope of this inquiry. 

Second, a mere photographic manipulation does not constitute a lie, or at least a lie which reaches a consequential threshold of significance. (As is true of lies in general, most photographic lies are essentially benign in effect. Others support low level, inconsequential deceptions. A fraction, however, are actively malign, operating as catalysts of large-scale delusion or far-reaching manipulation.) 

Let’s briefly discuss origins. Specialists in the field divide lies of this type into disinformation and misinformation. Disinformation is actively created with the intent to deceive. Misinformation is the pool of randomly circulating falsehoods accepted as true by people who are gullible, poorly informed, or eager to believe. One type of lie, then originates from a maneuver to deceive, to alter important substance, to encourage false interpretation, to nudge, jostle, or shift core meaning. Poison runs through the system, but only some of it is purposefully released. A second type of lie arises spontaneously from human interaction, emerging without intent or malice. The instigator can be non-human: an automatic function, or even sheer chance. A straightforward honest image can transmute into a photographic lie through a runaway algorithm, a freakish internet feedback loop, a sequence of unforeseen events, the unfolding of circumstance, the twists and turns of history, pure serendipity, or simply an ardent horde avid to embrace a falsehood. Photography is the only art medium which can produce an accidental masterpiece. In the same way, it also regularly spawns what we might call inadvertent lies, lies by happenstance. These can be the most persuasive because the secret ingredient of the finest lie is a grain of fact.</description>
		
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		<title>Marvels and Magical Beliefs</title>
				
		<link>https://lyingwithphotographs.com/Marvels-and-Magical-Beliefs</link>

		<pubDate>Sun, 14 Nov 2021 23:05:40 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Fauxtography</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://lyingwithphotographs.com/Marvels-and-Magical-Beliefs</guid>

		<description>Marvels and Magical Beliefs
There is something breathless and beautiful in these photographs, something exquisite in the depth of delusion they represent. This is a world bewitched. God speaks through eclipses, mountains form the uncanny shape of a woman sleeping beneath a light sheet of snow, and the cutest baby platypus ever known nestles in your hand. In this world, babies grow bouquets of teeth, Greta Thunberg is a time traveler who pauses in 1898 to pose for a photo, and the new president is displaced by a body double (but the fraud unravels because the crafty plotters neglect to note the stand-in is a lefty). In this world, the cold contours of the internet are rich with sorcery: Angela Merkel engineers a plot to poison the skies, long-tailed wharf rats grow as big as men, victims are actually quick change “crisis actors,” and a Palestinian boy gushes blood under perfect light. The world is a marvel and a glittering menace.

Some of these images feel like a stretch, almost unbelievable. This is hardly surprising; it takes effort to lie and even more to believe. Not much is revealed when we believe in the factual world—after all, it’s just the facts. But wholehearted belief in one lie or an entire edifice of lies is hugely revealing. It shows what we want to believe—what we need to believe—even when faced with shadowy origin, lack of substance, proof, or credibility. It is poignant testament to the power and desperation in our craving to believe. 

The algorithms sense our predilections. They divine our deep, unspoken needs and amplify them. Click this, states the deep math, and you’ll want that. The algorithms serve our desires. Each psychic realm contains a spiritual landscape; this one is impoverished. The highest achievements of visual thought and expression are transcendent, speculative, poetic. These images are hollow and shift meaning likes snakes shedding their skin. The loss is profound. We are unmoored. We have become sophisticated primitives.

These photographs are not intended to convey fact, a standard role of photography. Instead, they deflect, redirect, negate. They construct and reinforce falsehood. This is meaning of a type but one which contains a countercharge of anti-meaning. These photographs inflict metaphysical violence, lacerate the fabric of fact itself. However ludicrous, they look into the void. Nonetheless, the enticements to believe are multiple: expressions of political or religious tribalism, of self, of immoderate consumption, of fleeting trends in popular culture. In an age of uncertainty and upheaval, we seek reinforcement and lies serve that need. Belief becomes a form of worship or ritual. Facts are not strong enough to wash away lies.

Lying, of course, traditionally risks moral judgment. Perennial liars are exposed, sanctioned, scorned. But photographic lies are free-floating on the web; they circulate without source or author (like digital photographs in general). They are the perfect lie—lies without a liar. No blame or judgment can be affixed. They are an immaculate sin.

It is little wonder that policing lies has declined and embracing them has risen. When no target is apparent, it is impossible to censor, to moralize. This, we must assume, normalizes lying. The internet frees lies from the taint of the liar and tailored algorithms serve them up in a hyperabundant perfection calculated to reinforce our beliefs, needs, prejudices. They lock onto us like a parasite going home.

Exposure to the whirling circulation of images is finally not an expression of self or freedom, but a hollow exhaustion, an endless chase of consumption where the core currency is attention and photography is the language everyone thinks they speak. We imagine ourselves connoisseurs of liberty while falling in thrall to the photograph.

We live in a pandemic of photographic lies. Lies permeate, adulterate. They metastasize in ways impossible to control. They feed on mind and blood. They become a bridge we cross, purporting to transport us into the world but instead constructing a new, second world more real than the real. Facts depart before they arrive. Eventually, as mankind’s dark histories show, lies become us and we become lies.</description>
		
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	<item>
		<title>Precursors</title>
				
		<link>https://lyingwithphotographs.com/Precursors</link>

		<pubDate>Sun, 14 Nov 2021 23:09:26 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Fauxtography</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://lyingwithphotographs.com/Precursors</guid>

		<description>Precursors&#38;nbsp;
Lies have been in photography from the beginning. &#38;nbsp;Curator John Szarkowski famously described photography as “born whole” and that includes lies. “Nothing is as deceptive as a photograph,” states Franz Kafka. In the internet age, the possibilities of image creation and circulation have spread like oil on water, and so has the scope and ambition of lying with photographs.

This project constructs an analytic framework for classifying photographic lies, but we know that photographs have been unreliable messengers from the start. We are aware of the many precursor fictions far before our digital age: Hippolyte Bayard melodramatically staging a self-portrait of his death by drowning in 1840, Roger Fenton moving Crimean War cannonballs in 1855 for the sake of composition, Gustav Le Gray adding skies to Normandy seascapes by using a second negative in photography’s second decade, Oscar Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson undertaking complex combination printing in the 1850s and 60s, Alexander Gardner rearranging the rebel sharpshooter at Gettysburg, Francis Galton’s 1880s physiognomic composites. These and many more are outside the scope of this effort. We are concerned with photography in the internet age, photography turned up past ten.</description>
		
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	<item>
		<title>On Abundance</title>
				
		<link>https://lyingwithphotographs.com/On-Abundance</link>

		<pubDate>Sun, 14 Nov 2021 23:30:02 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Fauxtography</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://lyingwithphotographs.com/On-Abundance</guid>

		<description>On Abundance&#38;nbsp;

As image circulation has accelerated, it has become increasingly difficult to decide whether we live in a period of abundance or of debasement and decline. Do we live among riches? Or, like the late Roman emperors debasing the coinage, does each new image (or million images) reduce the value of all? In times of hyperinflation, it’s not just newly minted money that loses value, but all currency.

Photographic lies have an expanded field on the internet, but not for the obvious reasons. Most lies have limited appeal, credibility, audience. They need exceedingly wide distribution to find their audience, those particularly susceptible, and this the internet provides. George Bernard Shaw stated it succinctly: “The photographer is like the cod, which lays a million eggs in order that one may be hatched.” The delivery system is, literally, Amazon-scale. Additionally, sorting fact from fiction takes time and the web increasingly makes sure we have none. Technology theorists call this “accelerationism.”

Finally, the growing density of photographic lies threatens to cast generic suspicion across all of photography. The implications reach well beyond the final decay of photography’s evidentiary status. The internet is a polluted river, suspect, invisibly insidious. The polluters occupy a million hidden tributaries. They are evasive pariahs, tricky to track down. The flood of falsehood is, ultimately a comprehensive indictment of visual veracity. Seeing is no longer believing. The ultimate logic is doubt. Don’t believe anything you hear and half of what you see. </description>
		
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		<title>Manipulated</title>
				
		<link>https://lyingwithphotographs.com/Manipulated</link>

		<pubDate>Wed, 22 Sep 2021 17:20:36 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Fauxtography</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://lyingwithphotographs.com/Manipulated</guid>

		<description>Manipulated&#38;nbsp;


In purest form, a manipulated image is an original mutated. Manipulated images commonly begin with an unaltered photograph then use technical means to falsify, replace, or combine selected elements. Photoshop, the raster graphic editor released February 19, 1990, is the dominant software for manipulating digital still images (though there are many others). Photoshop enables a huge range of modifications from wholesale alterations and additions down to the revision of a single pixel.

“However much [photographs] may lie, they do so with the raw materials of truth.” 
—Wright Morris, (writer and photographer, 1910–1998)

“A photograph is supposed not to evoke but to show. That is why photographs, unlike handmade images, can count as evidence. But evidence of what?
 —Susan Sontag, (writer, theorist, critic, 1933–2004)

“It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Oglivy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence... Comrade Oglivy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.”
—George Orwell, (writer, 1903–1950)

“The question at hand is the danger posed to truth by computer-manipulated photographic imagery. How do we approach this question in a period in which the veracity of even the straight, unmanipulated photograph has been under attack for a couple of decades.” &#38;nbsp;
—Martha Rosler, (artist and writer, 1943–)

“Your sight does not master the pictures, it is the pictures that master your sight.” 
—Franz Kafka, (writer, 1883–1924)</description>
		
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		<title>Fog and Pestilence</title>
				
		<link>https://lyingwithphotographs.com/Fog-and-Pestilence</link>

		<pubDate>Mon, 27 Sep 2021 20:42:49 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Fauxtography</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://lyingwithphotographs.com/Fog-and-Pestilence</guid>

		<description>Fog and Pestilence
&#60;img width="2000" height="1941" width_o="2000" height_o="1941" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0437b8c23cc17cbcbeceec7e758e1958d5a779a22eead463deec4c34b17b27b2/1.1.1-Manipulated-Oval-Office-Being-Fumigated-1.jpg" data-mid="120717824" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0437b8c23cc17cbcbeceec7e758e1958d5a779a22eead463deec4c34b17b27b2/1.1.1-Manipulated-Oval-Office-Being-Fumigated-1.jpg" /&#62;
Satire is ironic ridicule with a militant edge. Raised to a high art by the Romans, satire is commonly deployed to critique folly, vice, abuse, or failure. The best satire operates just off the edge of reality. Consequently, it can be misunderstood as real, especially when it takes photographic form.

The ClaimIn the early hours of January 20, 2021—after the morning departure of Donald Trump and just before Joe Biden assumes the presidency—hazmat-suited fumigators fog the Oval Office. In some circles, the symbolism is greeted with glee and with wide circulation of the photograph.

The LieThe fumigation photograph is a composite. The base image shows the replica Oval Office at the Clinton Presidential Center and Library in Little Rock, Arkansas in 2016. (A 4000 x 2667 pixel version is free for the taking at Shutterstock.) The fumigators are government employees in Buenos Aires spraying for Aedes aegypti mosquitos, also a stock image. ($49.99 from Alamy.)
The Oval Office fumigating image was assembled in 2017 by the satirical newspaper Waterford Whispers News, described as the Irish equivalent of The Onion. They posted it on May 10, 2017 under the headline “Oval Office Fumigated After Complaints of Overwhelming Smell of Bullshit.” A delicate membrane, however, separates satire and the real world. Ironically, this image is false, but the White House and Oval Office are, in fact, quickly and thoroughly cleaned in the moment of presidential transition. In truth, after the Trumpian pandemic year, an extra $200,000 was spent on the White House chemical blitz.
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