How to Move the Taj Mahal
In the lower left of the photo we see a low fence at the edge of a lawn that reaches back toward the Taj Mahal. The fence is defined by two vertical posts, and two wires run through them. These wires continue toward us past the near post, then seem to hang in the air. Where is the corner post? It’s visible in another photo, taken at the same time, that I found on the Web site of an Indian magazine. But it’s not visible here.
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And why does the president seem to be superimposed on the lovers’ bench rather than actually sitting on it? And why would he have posed for a picture with his left foot suspended an awkward half inch off the ground?
Allan Sluis spotted the AP picture in the July 16 Sun-Times and alerted Hot Type. Sluis, describing himself as “a person who uses image-editing programs on a regular basis,” pronounced the picture a “clumsily altered…retouched composite.” He showed the picture to two professional colleagues, David Libman and Jim Larkin, and they E-mailed me agreeing. Sluis, Libman, and Larkin together claim some 24 years in the field of photo manipulation and long experience with Photoshop, a computer program that allows photographers to rejigger their pictures.
I understood Stokes to be saying that if the picture in the Sun-Times was odd it was odd for natural reasons that defy explanation. Not that he took my point that the picture was odd; he wouldn’t even concede the missing fence post. But if a post were missing, apparently this could be chalked up to the vagaries of digital photography and digital transmission–which, come to think of it, isn’t much of a testimonial to the present state of news photography.
Iw told my friend A.E. Eyre it was time to shop for new shoes. Something with rubber soles–to help navigate all those slippery slopes I’d been reading about in the papers.
Consider this New York priest, I responded, the one to whom a teenager 12 years ago admitted to committing a murder. A murder for which two innocent young men have been rotting in prison ever since. A mere four years after the actual killer died the priest spoke up and set them free.
