I was recently emailed these photos, supposedly news images from AP, Reuters, etc. Skeptic that I am, I wonder if they are genuine (not “Photoshopped,” or seriously altered for effect).
Why? Just a hunch. They were sent to me by someone who believes everything she sees on the Internet, they were accompanied by such fuzzy, feelgood text as “pics rarely seen on the news, pray for everyone…send these to everybody you know” and a few kinda look fake and overly sentimental. But I could be wrong.
It’s hard to search for a particular photo, although I have looked under the alleged photographer’s names and other news sites, but have not found these on the Internet in any form, altered or not. Anybody seen them and can vouch for their genuineness or fakeness?
While I cannot confirm or deny the validity of the photos, they look okay to me.
The first picture (with the cat) looked a bit suspicious, though. The cat looks too small and too perfect and slightly out of proportion.
The others, while not your “typical” war pictures, seem to be legit. The shadows appear to be in the correct places and I could not discern any tampering.
I guess “they look fake” may be in the eye of the beholder. To me, the first 3 (cat, child, and slap) look too posed or composed, but I can’t find any fault with the others except maybe guilt by association.
I looked closely (enlarging, checking edges, shadows, etc.) too, but couldn’t find anything conclusive. However, I know how wrong expert photo analysts have been in the past, and I was hoping to find a different kind of proof, such as an original (altered or not) on a pretty-reliable news or photographer’s site.
I can’t find an English page that has the pics, but I was just reading earlier today about Brian Walski, a photojournalist who was fired for combining two pics into one.
Since no one has found a smoking gun for these particular images, I am beginning to believe they are genuine and not deliberately altered. Not 100% sure, but maybe 95%. Hey – I’m skeptical to the core!
If it helps to bolster your confidence in the four credited photos, a quick Google search reveals that Damir Sagolj is a photographer with Reuters (who was in Iraq at the start of the war); John Moore is a photographer with AP; and Romeo Gacad is a photographer with AFP.
The cat one does look a little suspicious, though — it doesn’t look like a kitten, but from head to rump it’s not more that eighteen inches long. Also, it doesn’t look like the tail is casting a shadow, but that may just be a trick of the light.
I’m not exactly sure, but I don’t think the soldier in the ‘cat’ photo is a US serviceman. His uniform and boots look wrong, and his helmet seems to be the wrong shape. There’s a peculiar bit of netting tucked into the band of his helmet I think I’ve seen before. He’s also got a bipod or something on the end of his M-16. I suppose he’s Israeli.
The cat is weirdly proportioned for its size and the color seems off, but it may just be underfed and small.
All of the pictures (except for the first one) have MSNBC-style “caption credits”. Go to any MSNBC page with a wire pic on it and you’ll se what I mean. Some seem familiar too, but that’s probaly just me. To my eye, the pics look staged, but no photoshopped in any way.
Rex, you can take an image from MSNBC and alter the middle of it without altering the credit on the edge, or cut & paste a credit from one photo to another, so the presence of a caption doesn’t mean much to me.
They look staged to me, too. But I’m not sure of the difference between posing something live and posing something in the computer. Give me a pic of a soldier eating lunch in his lap and a pic of a baby, and I’ll give you a soldier holding a baby in his lap in place of the MRE, easily.
Technical analysis of the images (edges, shadows, etc.) may not conclusively answer our question. But the discovery of an original, unaltered image from a reliable source with significant differences from these would be quite revealing.
I vote genuine. I have seen similar photos of interaction between the British troops and American troops with Iraqi civilians that I am positive are genuine. Could it be?
Well, the cat is distracted by the photographer and in the picture the soldier’s fingers are about a millimeter from the cat. One second after the picture was taken, the soldier actually touched the cat and the cat, already tense from the photographer’s flash, spun around in a frenzy and clawed the soldier’s hand open, and was subsequently blown away by his M-16.
I’ve seen the “baby” picture on the “real” news sites - the soldier is a medic and the kid took a couple of small peices of shrapnel or something. Notice that the soldier is wearing blue rubber gloves and has the various small medical instruments tucked into his flak jacket that paramedics the world over keep handy at all times and the kid has small bloodstains on his/her shirt.
As for the cat picture, the soldier appears to be Israeli (maybe).
There is nothing I can see as impossible, unlikely, illogical or even out of place in any of them. Is there some reason for doubting them, or, I suppose, is there some need beyond general curiosity to verify them as “real”?
The soldier in the Cat photo does indeed look Israeli, though that’s just an impression from similar pics in other news articles. That’s a standard setup for an Israeli M-16 though, they’re big on optical sights. (Moreso than the average US grunt.)
