File this in the "mortal insult to mortal injury" category: The U.S. Army is apparently sending sending local news organizations Photoshopped pictures of dead soldiers, identical but for their faces and identifying data such as name and rank.
Bob Owen, chief photographer of the San Antonio Express-News, had good enough eyes to catch them in the act, and good enough sense to alert the Associated Press.
Now the Army can't find the originals. I wonder how many widows' homes and town halls are now adorned with these pictures of the dearly departed framed by a stranger's shoulders.
The Photoshoping itself isn't necessarily galling -- after all, before the age of photography, most portraits and statues used boilerplate bodies with customized heads. But combined with the anti-logical policies that put the soldiers in harm's way in the first place, and the abysmal treatment of wounded vets at army medical hospitals, this just solidifies the impression that to our military leaders, soldiers -- citizens -- people -- are just identical, interchangeable, replaceable parts that deserve no more consideration than a jeep tire or a latrine roof.
Previously:
Maybe it's no surprise given the multitude of high-profile Photoshopping stories in the press lately, but I think we can confidently say that "to Photoshop" has officially become a verb in the American lexicon.
I Photoshop.
You Photoshop.
He she or it Photoshops.
My anecdotal evidence: The Washington Post used the term in a vox pop quote without even explaining it. In fact, the reporter used it as the article's kicker:
Curtis likened the Census Bureau's stance to something out of the Cold War era.
"It's like we've been Photoshopped out of the picture," she said. "How long is the federal government going to pretend we don't exist?"
This is a great development. Widespread comfort with the term "Photoshopping" indicates widespread configurable literacy, and suggests that (a) media production and manipulation continues to become more democratized, and (b) people are thinking critically about the digital media they encounter.
What's also interesting is that the reporter reflexively associated the word "Photoshopped" with cold war-era photographic manipulation practices, despite the term's foundation in digital culture.
If you look at the Google Trends data, it looks like 2006 was the inflection point. I wonder whether Adobe's trademark lawyers are on this yet...
The sheer brute force of the Internet's distributed intelligence continues to baffle and humble me. If postmodernism killed the author, Google has finished off the rest of us. Seems like every time I have a moderately interesting idea, someone's beaten me to it. Which, of course, is not an original observation.
The latest: I had a clever little idea for a parody of the already-iconic Shepard Fairey Obama poster, featuring a blue and red John McCain, with the legend "Get off my lawn!" instead of "Change we can believe in." Ageist, yes. Puerile, yes. But probably politically effective in some small and moderately amusing way. After all, public opinion polls show that, when asked to identify McCain in one word, the most common choice is "old."
Anyhoo, I decided to Google "mccain 'get off my lawn'". Whaddaya know -- not only were there 15,400 results, but the very first one was my t-shirt design, uploaded to Flickr a week ago.
I hold no grudges. The "Hotness Factory," as its designers call themselves, did a great job.
In light of recent revelations about Iran's inexpert PhotoShopping of their recent missile launch, configurable satirists around the Web have done their own re-re-touch-ups. My pal Noah's Danger Room blog has a bunch of 'em. This is my favorite:
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