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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
How a software application brought political satire to the masses. Plus: The candidates' hot-tub embrace and other steamy gallery images.
Jul 1, 2004 | There he is, holding hands with Michael Moore. There he is again, toppling from grace, just like that statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad's Firdos Square. And, yes, there again is President George W. Bush, the cannibal father, jawing the head off one of his own children.
Simultaneous with the political rise of our current president has been the mass use of a technical innovation that makes one of the oldest tricks of the humor trade -- sticking the heads of public figures on funny bodies -- easier to achieve, and the results more lifelike, than ever before. Back in the 18th century, William Hogarth ridiculed the ruling class with elaborate paintings and etchings; today, any desk monkey can cut-and-paste a political statement, using Adobe Photoshop or other digital software, and have it circle the globe in a matter of days if it packs a big enough political punch, whether it's placing a McDonald's on Mars or, unnervingly, outfitting the Statue of Liberty with a burqa.
But the most Photoshopped subject of all time is surely George W. Bush. Just last week, Michael Moore launched his buzz-busting "Fahrenheit 9/11" with posters showing him strolling hand-in-hand with the president in front of the White House. Less than a week later, the Nation published a full-page image of the sculptor Richard Serra's appropriation of Goya's "Saturn Devouring One of His Children," with the president's head grafted over the grisly image. "Simple demonization," as conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan alleged, or pointed political satire? You be the judge.
Moore is surely a Photoshop fan, having used it both in his ad for "Fahrenheit 9/11" and for the cover of his latest book, "Dude, Where's My Country?" (which mimics an earlier manipulated image that happened to appear in Salon). But those contributions are barely a dot in the pixellated ocean of Bush images.
In Salon's own exhaustive search of widely reprinted Photoshopped images of George Bush, the most popular ones seem to fall into one of four themes: George Bush as movie "hero"; George Bush as druggie; George Bush as king; and George Bush as gay man -- all of which appear in our sample gallery. And for those of you partisans gleeful at the prospect (and unbothered by the sophomoric nature) of such images, be sure to click all the way to the end. Bush may be the most Photoshopped man of all time, but John Kerry has an emerging image crisis of his own in America's e-mail and Internet message boards, and the phony photo of Kerry with Jane Fonda at an anti-Vietnam War rally -- which duped even the Washington Post -- is only the beginning.
[To view our Photoshop survey, click here.]
John Knoll, who created Photoshop with his brother Tom in 1989, believes that the program -- originally created as a professional tool for the retouching, resizing and sharpening of images -- has contributed to democracy in two ways: first by allowing desktop publishers to create the same professional-looking color pictures that the big companies were making; and second, by giving people a voice they wouldn't have had before. "It's the inevitable consequence of the democratization of technology," he says. "You give people a tool, but you can't really control what they do with it."
