Faking Harmony
It was a perfect photo from a propaganda point of view. China’s Central Television included it in an awards ceremony as one of 2006’s most influential photos of the year. It conveyed exactly what the government wanted to convey to environmentalists about the recently completed Qinghai-Tibet rail line. The Tibetan Antelope, one of the five official mascots of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, is facing extinction and it is feared the new rail line will hasten that extinction. The photo appears to show the animals living in harmony with the high speed train.
It is a fake.
The photographer, 41 year old Liu Weiqing, was under contract with Xinhua to provide photos for China’s largest government-run news service. He faked the the photo using of Photoshop to combine two separate images and create the desired effect.
This is the aim of propaganda anyway, making the unreal seem real.
‘The truth is probably the opposite of what the picture was trying to claim,’ Su Jianping, a zoologist at the Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology, in Xining, told the journal Nature last week. The antelopes are shy and their migration patterns are being disturbed by the trains. ‘There is no such thing as harmonious coexistence between trains and antelopes,’ Jiangping said.
Read more in the Wall Street Journal and The Guardian: Tibetan rail wildlife photograph faked, China Eats Crow Over Faked Photo Of Rare Antelope
Sphere: Related ContentTags: fakery, Propaganda