English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

When I received this week's Time magazine, I thought that the photo of Reagan looked a bit off, but since I find republicans generally uninteresting, I didn't look closer. (Plus, I'm pretty sure I had PoMo on the brain.) Anyway, I just saw this blog entry pointing out the interesting credits for the photo. The first credit acknowledges the photographer who took Reagan's photo and the second acknowledges the creator of the tear on his cheek! Time's response was even better. They compared that alteration of Reagan's photo to a previous cover of Cheney standing in front of rolling storm clouds (obviously fake). I wonder how Nancy feels about this. Of course, this kind of thing isn't new. Just a few weeks ago there was a magazine cover featuring Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama so that they appeared to be in the same photo but it too was photoshopped. (How fun is it that "photoshop" has become a verb.) Here's the magazine cover for Time March 24, 2007 and here's the blog entry about it. Or, you may want to read the article in Radar magazine. They've included an update at the bottom with Time's response. Oddly enough, a search of the Time website revealed nothing of this. I guess that Radar's readership is niche enough that they don't think its necessary to include it on their site.

This image was posted to CNN on October 11, 2001. I remember saving it back then because it was funny (duh) but also because it was revealing that you had these two disparate cultures at war, and here was this slippage of the one into the other. What does the dialectic of Bert and Bin Laden suggest as an image? It makes Bin Laden look like an idiot (as friendly and nice as Bert is). What's funny i