My Lying Picture

In order to create my own photo that lies, I decided to focus on the epidemic of obesity in the United States and show how someone could easily trick children into believing that eating fast food is good for their health. I used images that I found on the websites of various fast food restaurants and placed them next to a photo of Terry Crews, a professional body builder and actor. By placing these images together and using the text "Fast Food Makes You Fit" I was able to create a poster that lies about the harmful effects of overindulging in fast food. Although I created this picture, it's not a far stretch to assume that a company like McDonald's or KFC would create a similar poster targeted toward young people who have the potential to be a huge market for increased profits. The harm in doing something like this is two-fold. The first is the fact that eating large amounts of fast food is detrimental to a persons physical health. The second cause of harm comes from the mental trick that is played on children who see this poster and begin to believe that fast food is good for them. In looking for other examples of how photo altering can have harmful consequences I found a short excerpt from a book titled 'Photo Fakery: The History and Techniques of Photographic Deception and Manipulation.' It explained how photographs have been altered for decades, even before the invention of computers and digital photography. A quote from this article that I found interesting dealt with the various ways to detect a fake photo, "fakes can be detected--with microscopes, x-rays, infrared spectroscopy, chemical analysis of photo paper..." While these tests may work for a person with acsess to a chemical lab, they don't really help the everyday person who would most likely stumble across a fake picture while surfing the internet. The most important thing I learned from reading the article, as well as creating my own photo fakery, is that the ability to alter photographs is available to almost anyone and when using pictures to draw conclusion, you have to be absolutely sure that the image you are viewing is true. The Citation for the article I used follows: Seamon, Richard M. "Books of interest." U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 126.1 (2000): 85-86. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 12 Apr. 2010.