The Weirdness of News

The idea that news photographs might be taken in any way other than at face value has turned out to be surprisingly provocative. I have discovered this in the course of several years of occasional postings to Usenet newsgroups. Therefore in presenting these images as a collection, I decided to arrange them as a series that goes from "easy" to "difficult." The easy ones have something about them that anybody would recognize as odd, such as a caption that doesn't agree with what the image shows, or the inclusion of obvious digital manipulation. Further on in the series though, interest centers on subtle aspects of the scene that would be overlooked by casual viewers, much as they might overlook the man in the gorilla suit walking among a group of people passing a basketball around in the famous psychology experiment It is for these images in particular that I am developing a theory.