Monday, January 1, 2007

The Camera Never Lies?

It's a well-known falsism that the camera never lies. Trick photography has been around about as long as photography itself, and newer technology keeps making it easier to manipulate photographic images. Now HP has a camera that makes people look slimmer in photographs.

This strikes me as so typically American. Instead of actually getting people to be slimmer, let's just make everyone look slimmer in photos. Then we can post these photos on the Web, so thousands of people we've never met will see us as svelt and fit. It's one more step towards isolating people from reality. The fact that the current crop of TV game shows are called reality shows is even more revealing of how unacquainted with reality we really are. We don't recognize reality when we see it, or miss it when we don't.

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