Photoshopped images of news events, those generated by amateurs, play an increasingly important role in our ever increasing visual culture. Altered images often act as virtual and visual sounding boards.
Recently, a doctored image of Obama's situation room suggests a longing to put the past behind us. It's a tongue and cheek parody of an intense and potential disasterous event.
The picture has been circulating on Facebook and elsewhere on the Internet -- it has gone viral. In the image, Obama as Captain America, Hillary Clinton as Wonder woman, and Vice President Biden as Daredevil are depicted as comic book heroes. Depending on your perspective the image is as entertaining as it is illustrative of our culture.
The subtle details embedded in the picture are intriguing - top administration officials playing first-person shooter games, Hillary Clinton eating an ice cream cone, and other visual clues imply an advanced level of digital imaging skills. Like gardening, model trains, and collecting baseball cards, photoshopping images has become a national obsession.
Iconic images are often defined as representations where the original meaning of a picture extends beyond the event itself. Iwo Jima, Dorothea Lange's migrant mother, and the first steps on the moon, are all examples iconic images because they are often recalled and replicated to explain other events or feelings. Today, perhaps our 21st iconic images will be those that have been digitally altered in some way -- manipulations that extend the meaning of the original to such an extent that the primary context is forgotten or ignored.
Lots of people bash photo manipulation as a negative from of artistic expression, but when it is practiced outside the context of news it can bring, to some extent, a welcomed level of comic relief. People need to process, grieve and to reconcile such complex events as 9-11.
It is important to contrast superheroes image, and others like it, with the manipulated images that followed the 9-11-01 attacks on the Twin Towers. Shortly after two planes, under the orders of bin Laden, crashed into the towers, an image of a man standing on the roof of one tower is seen with a plane in the background. At the time, such images were unique because many people were not quite accustomed to seeing images that were manipulated in this way. In addition, the narrative that circulated mostly through email, attempted to validate the authenticity of the picture. The story that accompanied the "tourist guy" picture told of a camera found in the rubble of the destroyed towers. After the film was processed, this image appeared. It was a hoax, a not so carefully constructed ruse to dupe the American public. But it was also a way of releasing the tension and grief following the attacks. It can be said, based on the millions of people that viewed the image, that it appealed to the darker side of who we are as a culture. Perhaps the visual trickery was the product of some bored teenager sitting in the basement of his parent's home in New Jersey? Reaction to the image was immediate as other derivatives of the "tourist guy" emerged.
The "Tourist Guy" first appeared a few days after the 9-11 attacks. Soon, other images "spoofing" the original emerged.
Beyond the "tourist guy" derivatives other images, some of them outrageous, expressed a culture accustomed to parody and satire.
Today, people look upon these images as incredulous -- but there is no shortage of them. Our culture has become flooded with manipulated images. Photoshopping images has ubiquitous in our digital culture as spam and pop-up ads.
Ridiculous and surreal, such images suggest not only the poking fun of power, but also an emotional catharsis from past events. People, individually and collectively need some way of resolving events they have little control over.
Cheap shot amateurs are taking aim at politics with a few clicks of a computer mouse. Photoshop as become the preferred expressive tool of the public muse.
Looking back on the first 9-11 photoshopped images, it is clear that the viral nature of such pictures continues and will continue for better or for worse. What is funny to some, however, is reviled by others.
As the generational gap between those familiar with traditionally acceptable manipulations of photographs continues to increase, there is the sense that separating fact from fiction will increasingly become problematic in our digital age.