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>> Male: Images are very powerful in our culture,
and that's because they're ubiquitous,
we see them everywhere.
And so we ascribe a certain truth value to them.
We assume a certain amount of authenticity
when we are looking at an image.
So, when something like this happens with --
this is Adenhage [assumed spelling],
essentially he faked some images in a Beirut conflict.
He took an image of an explosion inside of the city, and he took
and he duplicated the plume of smoke.
And in fact he did a really poor job of it; so poor, in fact,
that he totally got busted for it.
Now, if as a student you ever turned in this
as a Photoshop project I think that it would --
you know, it would -- we would definitely have to comment
on the amateur nature of it.
But as a journalist, as somebody who is trying to tell a story,
or reflect some semblance of truth,
we expected that images are taken from the environment,
and that they're not modified.
And so when you look at the newspaper,
you expect that either the image says, "Hey, this was modified,"
or, "The image is an attempt to represent the actual truth."
Pablo Picasso said, "We all know that art is not the truth.
Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth."
And what he meant by this, what he was talking about,
is exemplified in his painting, "Guernica."
Now, in the Spanish Civil War in 1937, the Germans bombed a city
in the Basque territory of Spain.
And now this was not a point in time when there was a lot
of visual media, but this painting was created
to reflect the passion, and the pain, and the terror
that happened at that point in time.
And if you look at it, it's not a realistic depiction, it is --
you know, you see bodies there, you see, you know, human forms,
but they're not -- it's not realistic.
But when you look closely at it,
you see something that's much more significant.
You see the pain.
You see the emotion.
You see the chaos.
You see the terror that was involved with it.
And this is what Picasso was talking about.
The painting does not show the truth.
It doesn't -- it's not like a news photo of the event.
It's not like a film or a video of it.
It's -- but it is an accurate representation
of the emotional impact of this
on the people who lived through it.
Now, so what is truth, I mean, and what is real?
To understand this we can go to epistemology,
which is a study of what knowledge is.
And by looking by epistemology, we know that knowledge is sort
of the intersection of truth and belief.
So, something has to be both true and you have to believe it
for it to be knowledge.
Now, like sort of moving on -- moving forward from that,
let's look at some imagery, and let's look at the way
that it's constructed.
And sometimes it's very playful, as in the case
of this computer sort of layered image, where you sort of wonder,
"It is -- like are we seeing through this?"
I mean, what is this about?
And that's sort of clever.
Or in the case of this house that's attached to a building,
again, like this is, again, a fabrication,
and is the image fabricated, or is the object like this?
Now, in this case the object is actually built, or in the case
of this cloud here, where it's a question
of just the perspective.
The cloud looks like it's sitting on the ice cream cone,
but that's just because the depth of field
of the camera is wide enough to show the person
in the foreground, and the cloud in the background.
When we start to deal with like sort of the troupes
of our society, we look at advertising, and we look at sort
of like taking and bending these things,
and this one was actually like based off of a Photoshop contest
to exhibit unsuccessful breakfast cereals.
And you see how this is like sort
of like engaged like the public.
These Photoshop contests, both on fark.com
and Worth1000 have spread like wildfire,
and they're like really very popular.
Or this image; and this image is a construct,
it's a constructed image,
and it's obviously fake on some level.
But again, you question, was it the fabrication,
was it the construction, was it the way that the image was made?
What is it that is real and what is it that is fake?
And also we have like sort of this image here,
which is really problematic.
I mean, you look at it and you see that the surface
of the building is melting.
It looks very much like a Photoshop filter.
But when you look closely, you see that the people
on the trees are just fine.
It's actually on the surface of the building
that this image is manipulated, or in this case
where it's a combination of two forms of transportation --
and this is just totally a Photoshop job,
but the Photoshop job was created in such a way
that it makes the boats really very much blend into the idea
of the underground and this sort of combination
of two forms of transportation.
The underground tunnels fit really well with the gondola
from -- perhaps from Venice.