A cloudless sky, an American flag and, to the left, something that looks like a music stand. A huddle of men in black suits, one in sunglasses staring straight at the camera, the others, arms stretched, are clustering round a fatter, older man whose face is streaked with blood, his fist raised as if fist-bumping God. This, in Donald Trump’s mind, is just what he is doing for he has survived the assassin’s bullet: something neither Kennedy nor even Lincoln achieved.
The composition, taken in near impossible circumstances, is breathtaking both for Evan Vucci, the photographer, and for Trump. It is the dream shot, a hero shot, taken a few months before the election. One or two points on his ratings, mutter the pollsters, but really it’s over and he’s won.
‘I shoot politics for a living, man,’ said Vucci. ‘Being a photographer you have to be there.’
‘F8 and be there’ is the first rule of news and war photographers. The first refers to ideal aperture – a few stops either way – could ruin your shot. The second evokes the 200-year history of photography, the technology that made it possible for everyone to ‘be there’.
The sad reality is that fakery has just become an aspect of our way of life
‘From today painting is dead’, said the painter Paul Delaroche when he saw a Daguerreotype – the first type of photograph – in 1840. Edgar Allen Poe went even further, as he often did. ‘For in truth’, he wrote, ‘the Daguerreotyped plate is infinitely (we use the word advisedly) more accurate in its representation than any painting by human hands.’
However, not long after, photographic truth seemed to suffer a serious illness. Early cameras were heavy, awkward things so the photographers began to cheat, shifting the debris of battle scenes in the American civil war for a better composition and, later, tweaking in the dark room and beyond. Even that celebrated shot of the US Marines raising the Stars and Stripes on top of Mount Suribachi in Japan was posed.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle foolishly convinced himself and much of the world that fairies existed. Doctored photos showed them dancing across the lens. His enthusiasm was touching but ridiculous
Later fakes were more credible. In 1936 Robert Capa, an indisputably great photographer, produced a stunning shot of Federico Borrell Garcia being hit by a fatal bullet in the Spanish Civil War. It was posed but it launched Capa’s career.
The mechnical sense in which cameras captured reality was strong enough to convince people that these images must be true. The introduction of doubt into the process was probably inevitable but, for great risk-taking war photographers like Don McCullin, it was a sad affront. Fakery should not demean his salutary images.
Sophisticated thinkers and artist photographer saw that this must change our understanding of photography. ‘The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion,’ said the celebrated portrait photographer Richard Avedon. ‘There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.’
That was a bitter pill but we swallowed it. Within hours of Trump’s ear being mangled the social media trolls, who increasingly seem to own the internet, denounced the whole thing as faked.
‘This is such a perfect photo it’s hard to believe it is not staged’, tweeted one smart arse of Vucci’s materpiece. Another said the blood on Trump’s face was ‘a paintball attack’.
Vucci can take this. Apart from anything else, the speed with which his hero shot was circulated made it unlikely he had time to do serious doctoring of the frame. And to say it was fixed is an affront to a very talented and, on this occasion, brave man.
But the sad reality is that fakery has just become an aspect of our way of life. With the advent of easily available AI processing, photos on Facebook, X, Instagram and the rest are all in doubt. I confess if I had seen those Trump shot before I watched the coverage – live TV can still bear the banner of truth – I would have immediately said ‘AI’.
The simple truth is that, thanks to a pitiably young assassin and a superb photographer, Trump had his super-shot and America, if Biden holds on, pre-elected her next president.
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