I. INTRODUCTION: STEPPING BACK FROM ASSUMPTION OF IMAGE AS “REAL”

A. Faith in The “Real” of the Image

“A Picture is Worth a 1000 Words”
“Seeing is Believing”

B. This is the Foundation of Existence, For If We Cannot Trust the “Real”?

C. But Take A Step Back And a Wider Look

D. Even If The Image is Undisputed, There is Perspective, Context, and Interpretation

E. But How to Establish? Who is the Authority?

II. A Few Words About Reality, Simulations, and “Simulacra”

A. A Note About Epistemology — “What We Know”

B. Do You Know Because “You Know” Or Because There is a Consensus About What “We Know”?

What if “Reality” Is a “Construction”?

D. The Complication of Layers: Reproduction and Simulation

Baudrillard: “The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction….The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: that is, the hyperreal… which is entirely in simulation….It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself.”

E. A Differing View: The Re-Working of the “Real”

1. The Event *Does* Happen

2. But We Immediately Contest It — Not Just Interpretation But Also “Control”

Have We Thus Substituted for the “Real”? — No, The Image Has Become Part of the Eternal of Power (Foucault)

III. Staging the “Real” in the Image

A. From the Earliest Photographs

Abraham Lincoln, 1858 and 1865

Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, 1863

B. To 1st Videos

C. To 1st Documentaries

D. To “Historical” Film

V. The Straightforward Case? Manipulation of the Image

Professor Bob Steele, DePauw University: “To digitally alter a news photograph in a way that changes reality and deceives the public is ethically wrong.”

A. Soviet Union, 1920s/1930s

B. Iran, 2008

C. North Korea, 2011

D. Germany 2015?

“SHOCKING PICTURE OF REFUGEES FIGHTING Police Officers In Germany With ISIS Flags”

—

No, It’s Germany 2012

“The picture appears to have come from protests in Bonn in May 2012. The protest began as one by a then ascendant far-right political party in the country, and the Muslims in the picture were part of a counter-protest.”

VI. NARRATING THE IMAGE

A. The Shift from the Visual to the Audio-Visual: The Hindenburg

B. 9-11

VII. EDITING AND NARRATING THE IMAGE

VIII. SO WHAT TO DO?

A. BASICS: IMAGE CHECKING

www.tineye.com (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

B. BASICS: IMAGE OBSERVATION

https://firstdraftnews.org/en/education/curriculum-resource/5-observation-challenge/

C. CONTEXT, CONTEXT, CONTEXT

A White Helmets Case from Syria

Donald Trump’s Retweeted Videos from Britain First

IX. CONCLUSION

Our task is not the evasion of “the duplication of reality”. It is to understand and meet the challenge of the “re-working of reality”.