“More real than real”: the image of American politics on the eve of the elections

Just over 50 years ago, President Richard Nixon privately wondered: photo Kim Phuc, the nine-year-old Vietnamese girl whose body was burning from napalm was staged. He said to his chief of staff, H.R. To Haldeman: “I wonder if that was a correction”—what might now be called “fake news.” But given the credibility of news photographs in 1972, Nixon could not shrug off the horror that this AP photograph Nick Ut caused, although they incited, resistance to the war.

“Napalm worries people. You see a photo of a little girl with her clothes burned,” Haldeman said. “I wondered that,” Nixon replied. The US military commander in South Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, also questioned the photograph. claiming at one point the girl was burned to death in a “hibachi incident,” but news reports at the time showed planes dropping napalm. And witnesses, including those with cameras, were on hand the day Kim Phuc was seriously injured, leaving much of her body scarred for life. Next year, President Nixon will withdraw the last American soldiers from Vietnam.

This year, an image of a young girl around the same age circulated widely. She is shown crying alone in a boat, clutching a puppy and wearing a life jacket. It received millions of views on social media and drew numerous responses, including many from Republicans who pointed to the image as a way to criticize the Biden administration’s response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Helen. While it was immediately noted that the image was likely synthetic, created using artificial intelligence, rather than a photograph, it continued to generate significant sentiment. “This picture is etched in my memory.” commented Amy Kremer Member of the Republican National Committee representing Georgia.

And even after many doubts were raised online about its authenticity, Kremer claimed“I don’t know where this photo came from and frankly, it doesn’t matter.” Her rationale: “It symbolizes the trauma and pain that people experience.” For many, there was a larger reality, a truth that did not need confirmation. Rolling Stone called article about this image “The right is heartbroken over the image of a little girl who doesn’t exist.” The Nixon-Haldeman conversation, if it took place today, might be much less cautious.

Such is the nature of the embrace of hyperreality—the larger-scale, “realer-than-real” interpretation of events—that we encounter on social media, on television, and in candidate speeches in the run-up to this contest. elections. Indeed, Cramer’s assertion that the veracity of the photo of the girl and the puppy was “irrelevant” was consistent with the view expressed to CNN by the vice presidential candidate. J.D. Vance who, defending his false claims that immigrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, stated: “If I need to create stories to get the American media to really pay attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Let’s look at various photographs of the ex-president Donald Trump accepted simultaneously some photographers moments after the July attempt on his life. “The photo of a bloodied Donald Trump with his fist raised and an American flag in the background is quickly becoming a key image,” the AP reports. reported shortly after the alleged murder in Pennsylvania. Why? The article quotes Patrick Whitty former photo editor at Time, New York Times, And National Geographic, claiming that “it captures a range of complex details and emotions in one still image – a defiantly raised fist, blood, agents demanding Trump be pushed off the stage, and most importantly, the flag.” This is what elevates a photograph.” Other photos of Trump surrounded by a crowd of Secret Service agents, looking shocked and vulnerable (some of them without a flag) were not highlighted in the same way. These images did not convey the necessary fortitude and defiance befitting a hero, as one newspaper wrote on the front page:bloodied but unbowed”—a description that could more accurately be applied to a comic book superhero.

The “core” image of a fist and a flag echoes other powerful photographs that have previously depicted Americans facing and overcoming enormous odds—raising the flag on Iwo Jima during World War II (photographed by AP’s Joe Rosenthal) and firefighters doing the same most just a few hours after the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York (most memorably conveyed Thomas E. Franklin for a North Jersey newspaper Record) — and imagines Trump being grazed by a bullet as a similar act of excessive heroism. In contrast, photographs taken by AP Ron Edmonds and others, about how the Secret Service forced Ronald Reagan into a car after he was much more seriously wounded in an assassination attempt in 1981, were relatively routine, showing the president being unceremoniously shoved into a car. The result of this Trump photo being widely published? “Already one of the most iconic photographs in American history, I suspect it will push Donald Trump back into the White House,” journalist Piers Morgan wrote on social networks.

It was also a brilliantly calculated position on Trump’s part, one that a media-savvy politician with a reality TV background had the wherewithal to take at that moment. Jason Farago would write V New York Times, “Photos say, ‘I’m safe; I am strong,” but even stronger they say: “I know that I must look like I’m safe; I know what I have to look like I’m strong.” In other words, the power of photographs lies not in what they depict politically, but in what they depict. talk about political imageswhich Mr. Trump seems to understand better than any other politician of his time… Mr. Trump had an instinct, in the midst of mortal danger, to think about what things would look like.”

A later series of photos showing Trump handing out French fries to pre-selected supporters at McDonald’s while enjoying the gimmick makes no attempt to connect it to any significant moments in American history. Instead, he demonstrates an ostentatious falsification of this event. Here the former president, although he is acting out a staged photo op, can claim“Now I worked 15 minutes more than Kamala,” trying to discredit her past work experience years ago at another McDonald’s. Pretending to perform in front of cameras is intended as a way to undermine real work, not to mention Trump’s decades-long history of favoring management, putting pressure on employees and belittling their contributions. There is no longer any need to even pretend that you are connected to reality.

This distancing of image from reality has been building in American politics for decades. While in 1960 John F. Kennedy famously won a debate with Richard Nixon on television by being the more telegenic of the two, two decades later Ronald Reagan, a former actor, would become president, playing the role of a cowboy on a horse dressed in a ten-gallon hat. In the race for the GOP nomination, the GOP chose “Dutch” Reagan, who appeared in such Westerns as Stallion Road And Sante Fe Trail— over his rival George H. W. Bush, a true war hero and veteran politician.

About two decades later, in 2004, it was no longer necessary to even play the role. By that time the journalist Ron Suskind wrote V New York Times Magazine, there was already a scaled-down “reality-based community,” a phrase he attributed to an official in President George W. Bush’s administration who denigrated public policy critics as those who based their judgments on facts: “The aide said guys like I was ‘in that , what we call a reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions arise from the intelligent examination of discernible reality.” … “The world doesn’t work that way anymore,” he continued. “We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying this reality – intelligently, as you want – we will act again, creating other new realities that you can also study, and that is how everything will work out. We are the actors of history… and all you have to do is study what we do.”

I recently did something similar. I use artificial intelligence systems to create photorealistic images of events and people that never happened. which never existed– spectators at the Nazi victory parade in Berlin in 1945, another parade in New York to celebrate the return of troops at the end of the Vietnam War, Kamala Harris at the March on Washington in 1963 (she was born in 1964) and so on. I consider myself a canary in the coal mine, pushing the capabilities of image generators to see how far they will allow me to distort the past and present. At the same time, I am determining whether I can still detect the difference between the synthetic images they create and real photographs, which I often cannot, despite working in the field of photography for over 50 years. Although I have recently found a growing resistance to the creation of nude images, the system I now use has become less restrictive and sometimes even encouraged the creation of images that insidiously distort critical situations and events.

Such photorealistic images prevent us from understanding reality and its consequences. The integrity of photography as an arbiter of what is happening (for example, the photograph of Kim Phuc in Vietnam) is undermined in many ways, including by companies that produce mobile phone cameras They are said to account for more than 90% of the photographs taken today. In an interview in Wired magazine, Isaac Reynolds Google Pixel Camera group project leader, argued that today’s photographer should be able to ignore photographic evidence in search of an image “that fits your memory and broader context, but may not be authentic to a specific millisecond.” Even more alarming Patrick Chomet A Samsung customer service executive recently suggested in an interview with TechRadar that “there’s really no real picture. Once you have sensors that pick up something, you reproduce (what you see) and it doesn’t mean anything. There is no real picture… You can try to define the real picture by saying, “I took this picture,” but if you used AI to optimize the zoom, the autofocus, the scene, is it real? Or is it all filters? There is no real picture, period.”