Image Analysis

The Knight readings for this week talked about photo analysis for research purposes. As a history student, I found this particularly interesting. History research for modern periods often includes some degree of image analysis. However, while Knight talks about the importance of gathering contextual information about images, in order to use them to understand a bigger picture, in history research gathering that contextual information often is the research. The image merely fits into the larger puzzle of understanding of the subject. That said, we were constantly warned against taking images at face value. History is full of images that have been manipulated and historians who have been fooled. Gathering as much information as possible surrounding the images is important in every discipline.

This was particularly relevant last week during the hurricane. A ton of incredible photos were circulating on the internet, especially via twitter. While many of them were proven to be legitimate, including the Dumbo carousel, the Hoboken station flooding, and tanker that washed up on Staten Island, there were countless fakes mixed in. Photoshopped images of sharks swimming in the flooded streets, pictures of a seal in downtown New York which were from a prior incident, and even screencaps from the movie The Day After Tomorrow were all released by people as purported Sandy images. Some of the more realistic fakes were even published by overzealous news outlets.

If you have some time, there are many sites out there who took some of the best images and analyzed both the images themselves and the contextual information to see which are real and which are not. It's really fascinating stuff, and a reminder that, today more than ever, you can't believe everything you see.