Politicians Vanish and Narratives are ‘Clarified’ — Synthetic Media goes Mainstream
On May 2nd, 1945, the Soviet Union (USSR) advanced into Berlin from the east, almost four years after Germany violated its non-aggression pact and invaded. As the allied armies of the United States, the Free French, and the British Commonwealth swept into Berlin from the west, the USSR moved its line of control forward through the city. These “Temporary” positions would solidify into the infamous Berlin Wall, but at this point, the West and the USSR were still allies. Hitler had committed suicide in his bunker two days prior and unconditional victory against Germany was all but assured in the USSR’s Great Patriotic War. All that was left was to commemorate it.
After the cessation of combat operations in Berlin, Soviet photographer Yevengy Khaldei, was taken to the top of the captured German Parliament building, the Reichstag. Khakdei took a series of 36 photos of soldiers raising an enormous Soviet flag over the city, an enormous flag stitched together from three-bed sheets that had, like Yevengy, been specially brought in post-combat for the photoshoot.
The most widely published photo from the series, “Raising a Flag over the Reichstag” is often compared to “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” taken by Joe Rosenthal of US Marines raising a flag on Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima for good reason. Both images are similarly iconic photos from World War II, both beloved images of victory for their respective countries, and both were taken to commemorate significant battles after combat operations had ceased. However, the Soviet one is different from the American one in key respect that isn’t immediately apparent: parts of it have been altered. In other words, one of the most famous images from WWII, syndicated in thousands of newspapers worldwide and seen by millions of people is synthetic.
But what had been changed? After flying back to Moscow and developing his roll of film, both he and his editor felt that the photo could use some more dramatic touches. Khaldei superimposed dark smoke from another photo and manipulated the contrast to give the scene the desired flair. Standard after effects. His editor noticed something else though: one of the soldiers appears to be wearing a second watch (one on both wrists), a potential sign of looting. The decision was made that this needed to be edited out as well. These changes can be easily seen in the pictures above.
This is the moment in history where synthetic media is mass media, newsreel is manipulation. Not only was photographic media capable of deceit; the public was told to believe it as ground truth. And thus began a trend that continues to this day: media manipulation as policy.
Yevengy Khaldei’s “after effects” shouldn’t come as a surprise. Nowhere was media manipulation as policy practiced as widely as it was in the USSR in the Stalinist era (1927–1953), when it reached its zenith.
While many photographs such as “Raising a Flag over the Reichstag” were touched up prior to publishing, incredibly, photographs of famously well-known people and well-attended events were altered after the fact if the people or events no longer fit into the official narrative. The most well-known example is one of the earliest: on May 5, 1920, Vladimir Lenin made a famous speech to a crowd of Soviet troops in Sverdlov Square, Moscow. This speech was well documented and later commemorated across the USSR in statuary and paintings. The original photograph on the left was considered iconic while Lenin was still alive and Leon Trotsky (pictured standing at the right of the podium), one of Lenin’s Commissars, and the Commissar for Foreign Affairs still had power. However, after Lenin’s death and Trotsky’s downfall under Stalin who exiled him and eventually had him assassinated in Mexico City, the photograph was never again shown within the USSR, rather the cropped version at right was used.
This group shot, taken at the 14th Soviet Party Conference in April 1925 is less well-known but is an even more prominent example of Stalinist photographic manipulation. The same photograph (both shown at left) was published in two biographies of Stalin that appeared in 1939 and 1949. In the decade between the two publishings, the photograph was retouched and the group rearranged to reduce its size from nine to four, as 60% of those politicians present in the original photograph were erased from history.
It would be easy to write off Stalinism as a uniquely deceptive environment and to believe that such media distortions could not happen in the West. Of course, it would be wrong to do so.
On May 31st, 1921 a little more than a year after Lenin gave that speech in Moscow, an event known contemporaneously as the ‘Tulsa Race Riot’ and more recently and appropriately as the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
On the morning of May 30, 1921, a young Black man named Dick Rowland was riding in the Drexel Building elevator at Third and Main with a white woman named Sarah Page. The details of what occurred in the elevator vary but Tulsa police arrested Rowland the following day and began an investigation. An inflammatory article in the May 31st edition of The Tulsa Tribune about the incident spurred a confrontation around the courthouse where Rowland was being kept- between armed groups of white and Black men, many of whom were WWI veterans. Words were exchanged, and soon fighting broke out, followed by shooting. The Black men fell back to the segregated Greenwood District.
In the early morning hours of June 1, 1921, Greenwood District, a district that had done so well that Booker T. Washington referred to it as “Black Wall Street” was looted and burned by white rioters “in response” to the earlier confrontation. This mob was supposedly assisted by a local National Guard unit with a water-cooled Browning machine gun. Incredibly, according to eyewitness accounts from 1921, planes circled overhead, shooting people as they fled and dropping incendiary devices on the rooftops of the buildings below. The Governor of Oklahoma declared martial law and imprisoned all Black Tulsans not already interned. Over 6,000 people were eventually held at the Convention Hall and the Fairgrounds, some for as long as eight days. After the violence, 35 city blocks lay in charred ruins; over 800 people were treated for injuries. While Dick Rowland was able to escape and was eventually exonerated, historians now believe as many as 300 people may have died in the massacre.
But what was said in this inflammatory article? We’ll likely never know. When historians went back to the archival microfilm copy of the paper from that fateful day, the article had been removed. This selective expunging of the event was just one of several manipulations, along with falsified official accounts and “lost” photographs that shifted the blame for the massacre onto the African American community itself and allowed the truly horrific nature of the event to lay concealed — untaught in schools, unrecorded by governments — for decades.
The Greenwood Massacre, though perhaps the most notorious, was not the first or last example of synthetic media abetting “fake news” in the West. Narratives that challenged the status quo, especially in incidents that involved race, were routinely repressed, and media was synthesized to support the ‘correct’ narrative.
It’s no surprise that as tooling improved, these manipulations became more widespread, both in the United States and abroad. A watershed moment came 1988 when Thomas and John Knoll developed and released Adobe Photoshop, a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Windows and macOS.
The software made it possible to manipulate pictures and documents in ways that would have been strictly the provenance of governments and their intelligence agencies just a few years prior. As with prior leaps forward in technology, there were repeated incidents of noticeable manipulations (uncountable controversies surrounding the appropriateness of photoshopping models on the covers of fashion and health magazines comes to mind) and detectable outright fabrications which, as with advances in photography more than a century prior, made the average user confident that they could detect such additions, whether art or artifice, whenever present; even if that was no longer the case as time went on.
The USSR was dissolved on December 26, 1991, and the internet, which like other technologies developed to fight the Cold War, found new civilian uses. These new connections widened and deepened, creating entirely novel networks, industries, and opportunities. The United States, victorious, promoted the end of the Cold War as not just a victory for the West, and capitalism, but for truth itself.
The large photographic centerpiece that greeted visitors to the 2020 National Archives celebrating the Centennial of women’s suffrage in the United States was powerful.
The 49-by-69-inch photo showed a massive crowd filling Pennsylvania Avenue in NW Washington DC. It used optics so that depending on which direction a viewer approached, it either displayed the crowd that was there for ‘The Women’s March’ on January 21, 2017, the day after President Trump’s inauguration; or it displayed a black-and-white image of a women’s suffrage march from 1913, that also took place on Pennsylvania Avenue. The symbolism of these two events, linked by place and subject, was undeniable. However several visitors to the gallery noticed that in the 2017 photo, several signs had been blurred (see photo above) — in other words, the image had been manipulated. Outrage quickly followed as many historians expressed dismay: “There’s no reason for the National Archives to ever digitally alter a historic photograph,” Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley said.
National Archives spokeswoman Miriam Kleiman answered for the controversy in the following emailed statement: “As a non-partisan, non-political federal agency, we blurred references to the President’s name on some posters, so as not to engage in current political controversy,” Without a trace of irony she goes on to note that: “Our mission is to safeguard and provide access to the nation’s most important federal records” and that “Modifying the image was an attempt on our part to keep the focus on the records.”
As synthetic media became mainstream, we see that content ultimately became a full extension of its creator, allowing creators to deform reality to meet their needs. That these creators, Soviet Premiers and US Governors alike, were able to shift the narratives and modify the records when it suited their interests- speaks both to the level of control these systems wield and to the public’s acceptance of its own manipulation. Given its power to distort reality, synthetic content was always carefully wielded, a fine line between art and artifice. While in the past it was those in power who decided which politicians would disappear, which massacres would remain hidden, and which signs would be blurred, as the cost of manipulating media continues to come down, this will no longer be the case going forward…
This post was written by Justin Clapper and edited by Brett Martin at Charge.vc. Previously in our Summer of Synthetic Media series, we looked at the origins of Synthetic Media and how humans have used technology to record and shape their narratives. In our next post, we’ll look at the development of neural networks and the rise of thinking machines. If you are working in or thinking about the Synthetic Media space, we’d love to connect! Get in touch with the team at Charge.vc!
Bibliography:
Ernst, Brian C. Accessed July 13, 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20160715004301/http://myweb.lmu.edu/rrolfs/commissar01b.html.
“1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.” Tulsa Historical Society & Museum. Accessed July 13, 2020. https://www.tulsahistory.org/exhibit/1921-tulsa-race-massacre/.
Fenwick, Ben. “The Massacre That Destroyed Tulsa’s ‘Black Wall Street’.” The New York Times. The New York Times, July 13, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/13/us/tulsa-massacre-graves-excavation.html.
“What Did We Do Before Photoshop?” PBS. Public Broadcasting Service, November 29, 2012. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/slide-show-what-did-we-do-before-photoshop.
Heim, Joe. “National Archives Exhibit Blurs Images Critical of President Trump,” January 17, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/national-archives-exhibit-blurs-images-critical-of-president-trump/2020/01/17/71d8e80c-37e3-11ea-9541-9107303481a4_story.html.
Tucker, Jennifer. “How the National Archives’ Notorious Alteration of a Women’s March Photo Is Part of a Long American Tradition.” artnet News, January 28, 2020. https://news.artnet.com/opinion/national-archives-alteration-womens-march-photo-1761525.
