Wars and Rumors of Wars
Mar 11th, 2008 by Colin
This is Colin. When I was in the Search & Rescue, I saw things staged for the news. I saw TV reporters bring in their own people in militaristic uniforms in order to add tension to the visual. I saw other reporters putting blankets over backpacks to make them look like bodies while the cameras rolled. It disturbed me at the time, but gave me an anchor for how I read the passages about “wars and rumors of wars.”
In yesterday’s news (actually the front cover of our paper), I saw a picture that I have to question publicly.
The caption was “A Pakistani lawyer runs away from tear gas fired by police officers outside the residence of the country’s deposed chief justice Iftikhar Mahmood Chaudhry during a protest in Islamabad, Pakistan on Sunday, March 9, 2008.” It’s an AP picture by Emilio Morenatti, and definitely an amazing shot. To be lined up, that close, at the right moment is statistically rare. But, and maybe it’s just my design background, my eye was immediately drawn to something even more statistically aberrant: his right foot is peculiarly snaking its way out of a pile of barbed wire. Just play it back in your head like a movie–a tear gas canister is thrown into a crowd of protestors. One turns and runs… and steps between two barbed wires at a reverse-inverted angle, then makes a jump over the rest only to find his right foot got out as statistically significantly as it got in…
No one else is running away from the gas, yet this man launches through the air, and, mid-air, both gets caught in and transcends this barbed wire. So what, I’m not a sleuth, I’m just saying I’m not really sure this photo is real. And I’ve seen, with my own eyes, stuff like this that was fake before.