Sobre la manipulación fotográfica

Errol Morris, director del excelente documental Standard Operating Procedure, inserta en su blog una interesante entrevista a dos expertos en manipulación de estampas fotográficas, a propósito de la imagen de misiles iraníes que resultó falsa. A lo largo de la entrevista se abordan temas como las posibilidades tecnológicas para trucar imágenes, la perenne tentación de los poderosos de modificar la realidad a através de estampas alteradas, así como nuestra terca ingenuidad para creer lo que las imágenes nos dicen. Aquí un mordisco a la entrevista:

Hany Farid, a Dartmouth professor and an expert on digital photography, has published a number of journal articles and a recent Scientific American article on digital photographic fraud. He seemed to be a good person to start with. If a photograph has been tampered with, he’s the person to analyze how the tampering has been done. I wanted to discuss with him the issue of the Iranian photograph starting with the issue of why we trust photographs in the first place.

HANY FARID: The short answer is: I don’t know. The longer answer is: if you look at the neurological level, what’s happening in our brain, roughly 30 to 50 percent of our brain is doing visual processing. It’s just processing the visual imagery that comes in, and if you think about it in terms of bandwidth, there is a remarkable amount of information entering into our eyes and being processed by the brain. Now, the brain samples like a video camera, but 30 frames a second, high resolution, massive amounts of information. Vision is a pretty unique sense for the brain. It’s incredibly powerful and is very valuable from an evolutionary point of view. So it’s not surprising that it has an emotional effect on us. The Vietnam War, the war abroad and the war at home, has been reduced to a few iconic images — the Napalm girl, the girl at Kent State. What seems to emerge from major events and eras are one or two images that effectively embody the emotion and rage, the happiness and anger. The whole thing somehow is enfolded in there. The brain is just very good at processing visual imageries and bringing in memories associated with images.