Archive for January, 2013

Photoshopping a Tragedy

Sunday, January 27th, 2013

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The human interest story that’s headlining the news this morning is a nightclub fire in Santa Maria, Brazil. Several hundred persons are dead.

Whenever there is a tragedy of this magnitude it is the sad but necessary duty of journalism to converge on a single photo to illustrate the event. In this event the media quickly anointed a picture with iconic status (attribution: Germano Rorato/Agencia RBS, via European Pressphoto Agency (EPA); AP; and Reuters).

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It is a photo taken on the street outside the club, showing fire trucks and rescue workers and other people milling about. The night sky is hazy, and we correctly read this not as mist but as smoke from the nearby fire. Here is how the photo is presented on the website of the Daily Mail.

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The same picture, but this time in a cropped version, can be seen on the website of The New York Times.

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Someone, presumably an editor at the NYT, chose to zoom in on the central tableau, cropping the photo’s left side, eliminating our view of the sidewalk and pedestrians, setting aside the direct glare of the overhead street light, and also trimming the remaining three borders. The reason for this is not hard to understand and appreciate. The focus of the scene, and what must have caught the photographer’s eye, is an anguished man carrying the prostrate body of a victim. Their vertical and horizontal forms create a cross, the pose of a Pieta. Although it is important for the record — for context, for history — to note that this picture is a detail of a slightly broader perspective captured by the photographer, Germano Rorato, I don’t think anyone can argue against this being a legitimate editorial choice. The fact that the picture’s composition arguably has been improved is not as important as this key observation: the reality of the moment remains undisturbed.

Other media outlets covering the tragedy apparently felt the original photo, in its entirety or cropped to its central focus, was not quite — how to put this? — not quite hellish enough. And so, at some stage in the chain of custody the photo was altered. There was some person or persons associated with the profession of journalism who made a decision to pump up the horror and pass their altered version off on the public at large. How? Easy.

Pretend you’re the lighting director at the Grand Guignol. Throw some switches and wash the scene with lurid red. There, that does the trick.

Here’s how the photo appeared this morning on the Huffington Post, the Drudge Report, and the Washington Post.

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There’s a phrase used in the media to advise against imitating a dangerous activity: “Don’t try this at home!” Yet on this occasion, in this heyday of digital manipulation, the keys to altered reality are not in the exclusive possession of the media. You can try this at home, under safe conditions. Just fire up your favorite photoshopping tool and, after just a few adjustments — Voilà! — you’ve successfully followed the lead of journalists into Hades.

In the example below, I started with the photo as cropped by The New York Times. I color-adjusted it in the crudest way possible on three scales: I increased Saturation to 100 from 50, raised the Temperature to 100 from zero, and shifted Tint all the way left to red.

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UPDATE 02-03-2013

An artificially pumped-up hellish version of the photo (an expert’s manipulation finer than my effort) has become the officially archived memento of the event in The Daily Beast‘s gallery slideshow of “Deadly Nightclub Fires“:

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Oh, what the hell, let me try to match it, once again using as a starting point the cropped original photo that appeared in the NYT, then playing with Exposure, Contrast, Saturation, and Reduce Noise. How about this?

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“One sun rose on us today”

Monday, January 21st, 2013

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Richard Blanco’s Inauguration Poem, “One Today,” is a fine poem, and it was well read by the author earlier today. The text of the poem is here; video of the author’s reading, here.

As he recited the work, Blanco made a few minor emendations to the text, some of which I suspect arose spontaneously as he gave voice to freshly written, newly memorized words.

For example, “pencil-yellow school buses” on the page became “the pencil-yellow school buses” when spoken, not so much out of intention as from the involuntary sway of vocalization. The natural urge to add emphasis most likely accounts for the written words “but always — home” becoming the spoken “but always, always — home.”

Certainly a more conscious amendment was made to the first of the personal references that appear throughout the poem. Early on Blanco mentions the legacy of his mother who worked in a grocery store “so I could write this poem.” Standing at the podium this afternoon, Blanco added, “so I could write this poem for all of us today.”

At another point he cleanly made a one word substitution, which I believe represented a thoughtful change. In the poem’s initial stanza the image of “a story told by our silent gestures moving behind windows” was improved, subtly, by replacing “behind” with the word “across.” The logic of this edit may have been the pull of consistency. Since the noun “gestures” implies movement, and “moving” is, well, moving, inserting a more dynamic preposition (across) feels right.

Others who have thought about the poem are praising it as simple and direct, not knotty, not abstruse, conventional; a little bit Whitmanesque. See comments here, herehere, and here.

In reading the poem I was struck by how smoothly Blanco introduces a major theme of the work — out of many people we are one. Note, for example, his selection of geographical features. Those introduced in the first stanza — the Smokies, Great Lakes, Great Plains, Rockies — are all of English (Anglo) origin. Blanco soon turns from grand spaces to a domestic and human scale, examining the actual lives and activities of real Americans. These anecdotal sections culminate in his listing of salutations, in a variety of voices: “hello, shalom, buon giorno, howdy, namaste, or buenos días in the language my mother taught me.” What Blanco is doing is tuning our ear to a wider spectrum. When, in the seventh stanza, he returns to American geography, he is now free to select examples that sit differently on the tongue and in the ear — the Appalachians and Sierras, the Mississippi and Colorado. It will dawn of the aware reader or listener that these are are American Indian and Spanish names. As for the Spanish ones, listen to the author pronouncing these titles with proud, lilting rolled-R’s.

The poet, who likes to say he was “made in Cuba, assembled in Spain, and imported to America,” today helped us rediscover, however modestly, the character of America.

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Half Dressed and Wholly Distressing

Monday, January 21st, 2013

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I saw an urban dog walker outside my office last week slowly leading a labrador retriever down the sidewalk and I wondered why the dog wasn’t wearing booties on all four legs.

Did the person who dressed him believe only rear legs qualify as “legs” deserving to be shod? Was this the lab’s preference?

Whatever.

I’m just happy to use the use the word “shod” in a sentence.

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The same day I spotted in Washington’s Metro Center a banner ostensibly touting Verizon services but freakily conveying an upsetting notion: belief is the enemy of sleep.

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The U.S. Capitol, a Week Before the Second Inauguration of Barack Obama

Sunday, January 13th, 2013

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In the distance, the west steps of the U.S. Capitol, photographed on a foggy Sunday, January 13, 2013, around 5:00 pm.

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At Long Last We Meet

Friday, January 11th, 2013

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Mike and Harriet:

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Contrails over Washington, DC

Friday, January 4th, 2013

A photo of contrails above Washington DC, in the clear morning air of January 3rd, 2013. You can see a new vapor trail being formed by a jet in the lower left quadrant, while in the upper left corner a bird tries to horn in on the action (click on photo for enlargement). This view is toward the East North East.

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