Pictures That Lie: Love-War

I chose to manipulate a picture of a B-52 Stratofortess airplane dropping bombs during the Vietnam war. The picture was originally from an image gallery on the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and I liked the original picture because of the scattered and detailed bombs in the picture, which made it easy to move and manipulate the individual bombs in the picture. The main manipulation of the picture was using the magic selection tool and copy/paste to move the bombs into a subtle heart shape in the middle of the bomb-dropping area. The clone tool was used to remove nearby bombs to make the heart more distinctive. Finally, the hue and saturation was adjusted to bring a light, barely-noticable red tone to the original black/white photo. The manipulated photo is a commentary on the slightly oxymoron about how peace is garenteeded through war and force. The jutaposition of the heart and the bombs with help to excepify this seemingly controdictory statement that a country's safety is dependent on it's ability to threaten and force its neighbors to coorperate with it. The heart is also a nod to the protests in the United States which ended the Vietnam War with out our success. I don't think my manipulation was particualary harmful, since it was first off pretty obviously manipulated because the probability of bombs making a heart shape is very low. Also I chose to manipulate an event that has already been closed in our history. If I had chose to manipulate photos from the Iraq War in a similar way, it would be more harmful since the people can still be manipulated into believeing one thing or another, such as the Lcpl Boudreaux case, where a picture of him and some Iraqi children holding a "Welcome Marines" sign was manipulated into saying negative things about the military. Though probably a joke in the internet community, the altered photo resulted in the Pentagon investigating Boudreax and his job coming into question (Casimiro).

Works Cited:
Casimiro, Steve. "Seeing Is Not Believing." Popular Science 267.4 (2005): 70-98. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 12 Apr. 2010.