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Reagan gets 'shopped!

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.The tear illustrator gives an interview to Q&A girl Debbie Grossman at PopPhoto.com 

Submitted by rhetoricat on Sat, 2007-03-24 03:04.
rhetoricat's blog

Web in Real-Time
Adryan's picture
Submitted by Adryan on Tue, 2007-03-27 07:25.

For a magazine dated for today, there sure is a great deal of buzz (and back-and-forth at that!). There's the photoshoping for the "mass" public of Time readers, the criticism of the technique for the web-sauvy, the interview for those sauvy in this specific field of software and finally, the Rhetoricat post for those of us trained to see culture converging and uses of visual rhetoric. I think Amy's got a point: convergence culture might just be another opportunity for class stratification.


Implications
nrivers's picture
Submitted by nrivers on Tue, 2007-03-27 09:49.

I am wondering then, what you are saying about the Time magazine cover and how it seems to reveal the class stratification that Amy argues convergence culture leads to.


I'm not saying that the Time
Adryan's picture
Submitted by Adryan on Tue, 2007-03-27 10:31.

I'm not saying that the Time cover itself is an example, but instead the multiple layers of response which are distributed according to the attention and access resources available to (digital class status of) each reader. Each level of expertise listed in my above post could be considered a sub-class. As I always ask my students: Who benefits and which voices are silenced?

Does that answer your quetion?


Good Point
magnoliafan's picture
Submitted by magnoliafan on Thu, 2007-03-29 10:23.

I like this point. I think that these levels of investment might not be quite so simple as saying that the more involved a person is in an investigation of this kind the more wealthy or priveleged the person is. Still, interesting.

L-Train