a few inherent problems with reality

UFO’s. Context is everything…

by Art Chantry ( art@artchantry.com )

MAGAZINE COVER OF THE MONTH: summer, 1992, issue of “UFO Universe” magazine. please note that this astonishing photograph of an interplanetary unidentified flying object alien spacecraft from outer space itself is actually the Space Needle in Seattle.. never ever trust a photograph.

Since the invention of the photograph, the images we create with them have been false. from the earliest images ever taken, there have been inherent problems with the ‘reality’ they show us. to begin with, reality is NOT black and white (no matter what the tea party sez). In fact, the initial exposures were so long that the very first photo of an actual person was actually a complete accident. a man stopped at a show shine long enough to have his boots polished and became the first human image captured on film. he stood in one spot long enough to actually make an impression.

AC:context is EVERYTHING.

Since that moment, complete fakery has reigned supreme. there have been ghost photos (double exposures in the darkroom), fairy photos (arthur rackham illustrations literally glued to photographs), dead people posed as live people, live people posed as dead people, giant fish and carrots, angelic beauties, rough gruff cowboy dudes, beautiful airbrushed nudes in playboy, ancient humans hunting dinosaurs galore. basically, everything that is captured in a camera is a lie, just because of composition in a camera frame – what is EXCLUDED is as important as what is INLCUDED. yet, we still think of photographic ‘evidence’ as a sort of gospel truth.


When it comes the imagination of the fantastical, there seems to be no end of falsehood. most flying saucer photos are complete fakery – i’ve even done a few myself. bigfoot has a zipper. the loch ness monster was a toy submarine. even that legendary photo of presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald standing in his back yard holding his soviet-made rifle and a copy of PRAVDA was a fake (created by the FBI, no less, to promote their case.) if you look closely, you can see where the head was taken from another photo and pasted to the print – the shadows go the wrong direction, even.

So, in a day of photoshop and digital imagery, you really cannot ever trust anything ever again. for instance, I have a friend whose job is to ‘enhance’ tv ‘documentary’ imagery. as an example, you know those ‘when animals attack’ tv shows? well, he makes them ‘better’. he gets hired to add gore. It’s a real drag to watch tv with him, because every time an astonishing clip shows up of a ufo or a bigfoot or an amazing stunt, he’ll say, “I did that.” boy, does that kill the mood!

Name the last commercial you saw that didn’t include massive amounts of CG? I’ll bet you can’t. we live in a time when dreams are becoming reality simply because we’ve all decided that the false images we see are indeed real. when I saw the movie “inception’, even the astonishingly real imagery of reality folding in on itself rather bored me. I mean, haven’t we already seen that before? seems like we have. “so, what else ya got?”

We all now live in Plato’s ‘allegory of the cave” as reality show.

Related Posts

This entry was posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Marketing/Advertising/Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>