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September 6, 2005

Back before Jurassic Park & PhotoShop...

...pictures used to mean something. Sure, there were those garden fairy photos, the Loch Ness Monster, Champ (the Lake Champlain Monster), Bigfoot, Sasquatch, the Abominable Snowman, and more aliens and UFOs than you could shake a stick at.

But dammit, aside from all of that, photos used to be proof that what you saw was real.

Well, now that we live in a time when Steven Spielberg can make invading Martians look dorkily plausible enough in their tripods* to pass for real, and matronly grandmas can use PhotoShop to merge together photos of their grandkids and the dog, and "clone out" unwanted tourists from the family group shot in front of the Washington Monument... well, reality just ain't what it used to be.

And so it goes with the news media, as well. It doesn't take a full-blown meltdown like the altered photo of septuplet-mother Bobbi McCaughey on Newsweek (see, for contrast, an unaltered photo of McCaughey, which ran on the cover of Time that same week) to see the way photo-ops have come to dominate media coverage.

No, I'm not going to link to more Katrina outrage. I've taken JMF's advice on the Nielsen-Haydens' blog, Making Light, and I won't say that I'm happier, but I can get on with the things I have to do.

So anyway, back to the photo of yours truly standing in front of a scribble-covered chalkboard. When I was interviewed by the very nice reporter from Seven Days, she commented that the photographer should definitely try to use the posters in my office as a fitting and interesting background for my profile picture. I thought that was a pretty cool idea -- capture the geek in his natural environment, so to speak.**

But then I arrived at work on Monday morning to find a series of voicemails from a staff photographer burning up my office voice mailbox (which I had not checked over the weekend). I returned his frantic calls, and within 10 minutes he was here are ready to shoot. I was dressed casually, to deal with the high humidity and heat on our un-airconditioned campus. I was planning to get some last-minute class prep done, as my classes were to begin the next day.

I ended up running around campus looking for an unused classroom with a chalkboard, as per the photographer's instructions. He had been told by his art director to pose me in front of a chalkboard.

After all, isn't that what all teachers do?

I'm not upset with the photographer or his art director. I found an open room (at the busiest time of the day, no less) -- one of the Geography Department's seminar rooms. I got to cover the chalkboard with ideas from and about my Digital Composing class -- what is "composing," who does it, what media are or can be used, what technology does it involve, why?

There I was, wearing a t-shirt (and a nice new pair of linen slacks*** that I was trying out to see how they would handle the sultry weather) in a classroom in which I will almost certainly never teach, standing in front of a chalkboard (which I never use -- my rooms all have whiteboards, which are, quite frankly, much messier and stain-inducing) covered with ideas and distinctions that really are central to my classes.

So there you have it -- yet another media blending of fact and fiction, gussied up to look even better than the real thing (the computer labs in which I teach are decidedly not photogenic), and with a tenuous link to actual events and/or people. Much like the nightly news.

* Although it is probably important to note that the official WotW site does not, in fact, include any pictures of said realistic-looking tripods. This is undoubtedly in an effort to make you buy a ticket to see the baddies, but it's also a way to prevent nit-pickers from staring at the images to determine how fake they look...

** Yes, I am the proud owner of a reproduction of Mulder's UFO "I WANT TO BELIEVE" poster from the X-Files. It was purchased at none other than the Official Roswell, New Mexico UFO Museum. Man, the geekiness just keeps on coming...

*** Yes, that was my word. Who knew it would come back to haunt me?! As I explained to a friend, my mother taught me that pants were generic things that went from your waist to your ankles, while slacks were much nicer, dressier versions of the same. Hence, jeans (even the $4000 pairs) are pants, but suit separates are slacks. So, when I needed fancy new work clothes, I mostly needed dressy pants. Ergo, I bought "slacks."

I blame the coursening of our culture for the ribbing I've been getting about using the word slacks.

UPDATE: Edited for slightly improved clarity. Also, an alert reader notes: "Interesting that it said [i] bought slacks somewhere special, but the photo was from the waist up." Take that, snarky caption-writer!

Posted by reparent at September 6, 2005 2:11 PM

Comments

Posted by: Sunny at September 6, 2005 9:53 PM

Posted by: Richard Parent at September 7, 2005 9:05 AM

Posted by: coeurlion at September 7, 2005 12:26 PM

Posted by: Richard Parent at September 7, 2005 1:57 PM

Posted by: Sunny at September 7, 2005 6:18 PM

Posted by: coeurlion at September 7, 2005 7:30 PM