11 November 2018

Let Them Hang




Below is a list of the photos in order. Here's the legend:

        * '+'   means a pictures with an identifiable person
        * '-'   means a pictures with with faces obscured by cropping or
photoshop
        * '[+]' means the photo is widely available
        * '[ ]' means the photo does NOT turn up in reverse images searches.

? that last category is interesting, because it narrows the scope of
where the images come from.

        * [#]   means there's some interesting detail (below the list) about
its origin

The photos, in order:

- [+] Boston Dynamics robot dogs running
+ [+] woman wearing a keffiyeh with an assault rifle in the back of a
pickup truck
- [+] gender-balanced, faceless people in a crowd ? maybe a demo,
maybe a concert, probably in Europe
- [ ] Instagrammy composite photo of a skinny woman's arms, four hands
flipping the viewer off
- [ ] people eating, maybe communally, faces blurred in photoshop
- [+] stock photo of an athletic woman running on a race track
+ [+] composite photo ("harveryaftermath") of blacks and whites working
to save kids in a flood zone
+ [ ] poor Latin American kids, maybe in school, with a boy hiding his
face behind paper, bandana-style
- [ ] a punching bag hanging in some sort of crude training camp
- [1] composite photo of two white men crouching behind a mound, one
with a rifle, one with binoculars
- [+] two helmeted motorcyclists pulled off by he side of a remote road,
maybe coordinating
- [ ] arbitrary 3D-rendered thing (a "network" I guess, but quite
unusual ? interesting detail)
+ [ ] outdoorsy white woman, long hair flowing, resolutely digging a
trench
- [ ] hippyish white man (probably), framing a house
- [ ] someone welding
+ [ ] infrastucture-ish composite: white guy working on a tower
scaffold, container ships
- [2] ambiguous photo of someone burning branches, distant crowd visible
through the smoke
- [+] composite: car burning, small group of people in a burning forest
        source:
https://tineye.com/search/5db3c04fd14bd706fae384a44674a21bdcb9d457/
- [+] misc boats in a flood zone (also Hurricane Harvey, in Houston)

More details:

[1] The two men crouching behind a mound is cropped from an image that
appears in several articles about westerners who joined ~local forces to
fight ISIS
        https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3049019/Peshmerga-s-foreign-legion-fighting-alongside-defeat-ISIS-workers-ex-soldiers-brave-men-world-teaming-Kurdish-forces.html
        https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-normal-guys-from-the-uk-and-us-who-have-given-up-their-day-jobs-to-fight-isis-in-syria-10195105.html
        https://beta.al-akhbar.com/Arab/19873/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AC%D9%8A%D8%B4-%D9%8A%D8%AD%D8%B1%D8%B1-3-%D9%82%D8%B1%D9%89-%D8%A8%D9%8A%D9%86-%D8%AE%D9%86%D8%A7%D8%B5%D8%B1-%D9%88%D9%85%D8%B7%D8%A7%D8%B1-%D8%A3%D8%A8%D9%88-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B8%D9%87%D9%88

[2] the photo of someone burning branches comes from an image
("dakota2.jpg) that appears widely on college essay?selling websites
to illustrate a webpage called "law-enforcement-essays.html", with a
bias toward "racial profiling essays" and "essay on police corruption"
        https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=1-nmW9WJIu3isAeVr6KYDg&q=%22law-enforcement-essays.html+%22&oq=%22law-enforcement-essays.html+%22&gs_l=psy-ab.3...628.3317.0.3913.5.4.0.0.0.0.116.320.3j1.4.0....0...1.1.64.psy-ab..1.0.0.0...0.LHWyEv-PD5c

That last bit is interesting, because it suggests something that had
never occurred to me: essays-for-sale websites being used to identify
specific students' political leanings. Maybe some enterprising
journalist can take that one on ? by using reserve image searches to
identify where ~stock photography is used on anonymous, cloned
essay-selling sites.

Other possible follow-ups that could shed light on where this site comes
from:

- language analysis, to see where else the phrasing is popping up
- identifying faces (for example, the woman digging a trench)

One really interesting find: Reverse image searches turn up one more
photo that didn't make it into the final production, called
"hangingrose.203ee432.png," which was to appear in a section called "Let
Them Hang ..." It's a homebrew photo (not available elsewhere) of a
bouquet of flowers, hanging upside-down on a wall, above a US-style
electrical socket. That seems like a pretty sophisticated proposition: a
sentimental appeal phrased in the passive voice but strongly suggestive
of political violence as a tragic, forlorn necessity. I have
screengrabs. Who "they" are who'll be hanging is left to the reader's
fantasy. The phrase "let them hang" comes from Shakespeare's Twelfth
Night (1.3), but it's attained a slightly meme-like status in a variety
of music circles:

        https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22let+them+hang%22


—Ted Byfield on nettime

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