DECEIVE ME

AND DO IT WELL

by TOMAS ČIUČELIS
2008

The truth has a structure of a fiction.

Jacques Lacan

Fake it till you make it.

Alcoholics Anonymous

From the very early days of photography, when pictorial representation (photographic
image) was incorporated into the mass media, the concept of a “historical moment”
became dependant on numerous factors of regulation, direction, and censorship. The
story had to appear “more real” than the truth itself. It often comes out that appearances
are not “beeing seen” by the subject, but they are “being shown” to the subject. But does
such a disclosure realy change anything?

While speaking on manipulating the contents of a mediated image, we usually

mean the technique of transforming the visual representation of a real referent in order
to change the perception of reality itself. In other words, manipulation means dealing
with the referent via his/her/its representation. While contemplating on the image as a
historical representation, we may ask: what is and where is the referent of the representa-
tion contained in the mediated message and what can we call an “authentic” image of a
historical event?

I. Manipulation as an Ideological Act

On July 9, 2008, when Iran completed their Sahib-3 missile launch test-fire,
Agence France-Presse obtained a photo of the event from Sepah News website. Sepah News
is a news agency, acting as a media arm of Iranian Revolutionary Guards. On Wednes-
day night, the photo was already erased from Sepah News site. On Thursday, without
further explanation, Sepah News published another photo that Associated Press dis-
tributed in turn. The current variation is just another version of the first photo—nearly
identical to the first one, even though it shows three missiles instead of four. Conse-
quently, the first version of the photo was revealed to be a digital manipulation.
DECEIVE ME AND DO IT WELL

Editor & Publisher announced that on Wednesday, Los Angeles Times, The Fi-
nancial Times, Chicago Tribune and other respectable newspapers, as well as BBC News,
MSNBC, Yahoo! News and NYTimes.com agencies published a doctored photo displaying
four Iran missiles. The other day, they all issued mass apologies and corrections of this
“misunderstanding.” 1

An attempt to understand the logics of this very manipulation might develope

several ideas. First of all, a more thorough examination has disclosed that the original
shows three missiles that have just been launched, and the forth one still on the launch-
pad in the truck. According to the experts, the forth missile was not lauched due to some
kind of disorder. 2 Therefore, the missile could have been fired, even though we don’t see
the record of their syncronous launch. None the less the moment was later “reproduced”
by a manipulator. It means that the doctored version of the event remains symbolically
true in the same sense as a painted portrait is also symbolically “true”: it documents a set
of non-simultaneous visual elements that, however, essentially define the event/the object
being portrayed. Given the definition of this kind of image, isn’t it the maximum approxi-
mation to the status of a “historical moment”? The adulteration seems to tell us: “Does it
really matter how many missiles took off the ground? What matters is that we have them
and we show them. Therefore, we can add one more.”

The paradoxical case of Iran is not a precedent and event its scale surprises us no
more—the adulteration has reached all news agencies all around the world and it was
published in numerous media channels. With the disclosure of the fraud, the official
Iranian manipulators and their PhotoShop skills, as well as the very specific character of
concealing the militarist impotence, have become a target of mass mockery in the West
(especially in the Western blogosphere) but the case is still significant and illustrative.
Judging by the response from some of the news editors and heads of agencies, 3 they just
accepted the doctored picture after giving it a “quick glance.” Therefore, a photo match-
ing the criteria of “a quick glance” can travel all around the world and bring about the
desired effect even before it is revealed to be just an adulteration. Despite the denial of
the canard, it still does not disappear without a trace and it is still effective. The attempts
to conceal, complement, or correct something—which means changing the contents of
the message—in its turn, reveals another level of the message: the way and the very fact of
saying something is more important than what is being said.

My personal instinctive reaction upon seeing the images denouncing the canard
(the comments in the news websites assured me that the reaction of most of the readers
was not much different), was astonishment: why should somebody bother at all to pro-
duce a picture showing a launch of four––instead of three––missiles? Or more accurate-
ly—why am I being deceived so poorly? Here are some interpretations in an attempt to
generalize this and other similar cases.

First of all, why should we believe that there is some kind of an “authentic” visual
representation of a story? A look upon what might be called the visual documentation
of the XX century history shows us a systematic use of certain methods to create sym-
bolic meanings––i.e. of propaganda. The XX century witnessed the propaganda in its full
bloom. Its definition changed after World War II, but its function remained the same––a
persistent manipulation of the listeners/viewers. Without going into detailed definitions
of propaganda, I will allow myself to make an assumption that a deception is something
DECEIVE ME AND DO IT WELL

very close to the truth—perhaps even truer than the truth itself, because the reasons of an
“intention to deceive” define the concept of the truth itself, while the deception contains
both “truth” and the method transcending it, and the disclosure of this method may give
us knowledge of some another, “higher truth.” A deception is a complex structure, it’s a
consequence of manipulation. What we call the visual representation of history has long
before teleportated itself into the level of symbolic proceeding, where the representation
of an object is being transformed into a construct with no “authentic” referent—and the
symbolic meaning of such a construct nowadays, in spite of everything, is perhaps even
more relevant than the very object of reference.

A “historical moment” seems to be an intention of a relevant moment—an

intention that is left offscreen: something that needs some “help” from outside in order
to be recognized. It acts as an unrealized notional layer of the event. The represented
event gains an aura of “historicity” with the help from an arsenal of retouche, collage and
digital manipulations. With addition of a “secret” code of proceeding, the “secrecy” of the
image becomes visible despite the fact that the initial event had probably had no secret
intention at all. It is a production of symbolic meanings, and the results of this produc-
tion—by following the logics of organizing this kind of representation—align into a sym-
bolic narrative. There is a natural desire to go under that symbolic curtain, to bypass the
illusion and to collide head-on with the reality, or to swallow the “reality pill,” but what if
the very “veil of propaganda” is the real “truth” of the story? What if this “veil” is a power
constructing my own daily life, what if it’s a condition of all social interactions? It is a
fantasy in the reality proper.

There are plenty of analogues for such “truth”: these are the stories of symbolic
proceeding and they belong not only to the field of art—they also, of course, involve the
spheres of structuring the social and political reality. It’s something that is always pre-
sent in our reality; it influences our formation as participants of social relations. These
symbolic stories are something that we have got used to in our world. Here, I am us-
ing the term “world” in the historical sense—meaning a certain entirety of dominating
worldview that also has other historical alternatives: for instance, the Western or Eastern,
the Christian, the Moslim worlds, etc. We can find interesting examples of representing
“historical moments” in some other worlds. Here is an extract from a propaganda text,
distributed in 1952 by South Korea during the Korean war:

Hero Kang Ho-yung was seriously wounded in both arms and both legs in the
Kamak Hill battle, so he rolled into the midst of the enemy with a hand grenade
in his mouth and wiped them out, shouting:
My arms and legs were broken. But on the contrary my retaliatory spirit against you
scoundrels [US soldiers] became a thousand times stronger. I will show the unbending
fighting will of a member of the Workers’ Party of Korea and unflinching will firmly
pledged to the Party and the Leader! 4

We should not rush to laugh at poor Kang, who—while facing his death with
a hand grenade in his mouth—is blurting out such a complicated speech. It would be
wrong to understand the description of this episode literally. A closer look upon Western
culture would reveal us even more spectacular episodes. For example, in Wagner’s opera,
the fatally wounded Tristan is singing a tedious, nearly one-hour long aria before his
death.... It would be difficult to imagine an audience hall roaring with laughter at this
DECEIVE ME AND DO IT WELL

kind of “unconvincing action.” Even though these examples are not adequate in their
claim of authenticity (the case of Korea still deals with Kang Ho-yung who did really ex-
ist), we can read them as separate cases of a general logic of symbolic representation of an
event. Therefore, in the Iranian missile case, does not the manipulator’s approach to visual
representation of the event remind the same logics of symbolic proceeding? What is the
difference between this case and the many cases when the USA photo manipulations were
disclosed? 5

Another problematic aspect in the analysis of this case of manipulation concerns

my nearly instinctive need for some conspiracy theories. The viewpoint of a goal/result
implies that there are two possible kinds of manipulation: successful manipulation or
unsuccessful one. The failure of manipulation may be due to the lack of experience of the
manipulator, as well as the underestimated discernment of an audience, or an information
leak. This kind of manipulation ends in a disclosure whose result is a complete destruc-
tion of symbolic structure, the loss of initial meaning and confidence. Meanwhile, suc-
cessful manipulation is not just (or not necessarily) a technically flawless message/process,
but a certain kind of strategy applied to it that has been worked out in advance for several
steps forward. In this way, successful manipulation may also include “unsuccessful ma-
nipulation,” if the outcome of the latter (or the sequence of events that it caused) proves
out to be intended in advance. This case would provide a new dimension for the concept
of manipulation—the status of hypermanipulation, or transgressive manipulation. Here
we can raise a question that implies a forementioned theory of conspiration: was the
technically rough manipulation in the Iranian case just a technically rough manipulation,
or was it a conscious attempt to discredit Iran and the news agency?

II. A PhotoWar

Despite the temptation of resorting to manipulation, the highly-technologized

world still safeguards a digital image as an authentic document that reflects reality. There
is a quest for more and more complex technological solutions that would help detect a
digital manipulation, but still there is no standard, no authenticity safeguard for a digital
image, and what is more—we still cannot talk about a unanimous cooperation between
those who produce an image and those who consume it. There are all kinds of require-
ments applied to a digital image with a status of news/editorial image,6 but so far, no
standardised discipline mechanism that would maintain the „authenticity“ of the image
(i.e. would recognize the consequences of manipulation in a digital image) has been pro-
vided; so those requirements are still actually a subjective ethic criteria. It is true that the
tendencies of an image discipline do exist: after several world-wide known cases, when
Adnan Hajj—a freelance photographer for Reuters—presented the agency with his digi-
tally doctored photographs (so-called Reutersgate scandal),7 the agency committed Adobe
company to create an algorythm for detecting manipulations in digital images. Therefore,
digital image media inevitably tend to form objective strategies for protecting the referent
of an image. This means that the representative image is (still?) being obstinately attached
to the classical status of “authenticity,” which in Noam Chomsky’s terminology may have
the name of “a necessary illusion”: i.e. one of many fictions that help (paradoxical as it
may be) to maintain a uniform world outlook without breaking the crystal palace of the
referent. Even though the fall of this classical paradygm has long begun, it is obvious that
it has not yet come to an end.
DECEIVE ME AND DO IT WELL

It is curious though, that the Iranian case is still not something of a shock, as it is
(having in mind a whole ocean of other cases of digital manipulations) the fulfillment of
the ever-present temptation to manipulate. I mean not only the temptation that comes
from the capabilities of any potential manipulator (for it is truly incoherent public that
has some skills in working with PhotoShop nowadays), but also the temptation because of
the very context that the image enters—it is an environment of mass consumption where
the critical discourse of a digital image, in the best case, is still undergoing the formation
process. The daily experiences of regularly doctored images can numb even the effect of a
disclosed manipulation in the political imagery sphere. It seems natural to expect “some-
thing like that,” when the technologies and equipment for doctoring digital images are
accessible to everyone, when they have become a part of daily experience for those who
are simultaneously involved in creating and consuming the web culture—those whom
Geert Lovink (not considering the ethical evaluation, but referring to the classical con-
cept of “competence”) has called “amateurs.”

So, what was the point of adding that ill-fated fourth missile? Perhaps this is not
so important on the first sight, perhaps there is “just” an unexperienced manipulator be-
hind it, but here I also have to admit some inevitable psychoanalytical implications. The
case makes us suspect that a phallocentric image of a missile taking off—as the image of
military potency—was so important to the manipulator(s), that it had to receive a sensi-
tive interpretation.

We are left to expect something impossible—a safe visual photowar, where the
response to these kind of “attacks” would be the USA attempt to digitally clone their own
military arsenal with the help of PhotoShop. A war where the opponents would openly
use manipulations in a photowar. Perhaps this suggestion is quite humorous, still theoret-
ically it is—having in mind the role of propaganda in our daily life—not so preposterous.

1
1
Joe Strupp, UPDATED: Altered Iran Missile Test Photo Makes Front Pages—Corrections Slow in Coming—
Did Launch Fail? (Editor & Publisher, July 10, 2008).
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003826336

2
Iran doctored missile test-firing photo: defence analyst, LONDON (AFP), Jul 10, 2008. Google News:
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5h02c0KdPqnRSFFVj9dn9pWaVMCJQ

3
Mike Nizza and Patrick Witty, In an Iranian Image, a Missile Too Many (New York Times blog, July 10,
2008).
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/in-an-iranian-image-a-missile-too-many/index.html?hp

4
Cited in: Bradley K. Martin, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader, p. 85 (Thomas Dunne Books,
2004).

5
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/digitaltampering/

6
E.g., DigitalCustom Model Ethics Guidelines To Protect The Integrity of Journalistic Photographs in Digital
Editing:
http://www.digitalcustom.com/howto/mediaguidelines.asp
7
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adnan_Hajj_photographs_controversy