We first encountered the phrase “alternative facts” when Kellyanne Conway defended the U.S. Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, after he lied about the number in attendance at Donald Trump’s inauguration. It strikes me that, in the age of Photoshop and deep fakes, we can have alternative photos too. So I have begun a little personal project.
Official photos of the president are in the public domain and, at least in the case of Donald Trump, are readily available on the whitehouse45 Flickr account. That means anybody can have at them for just about any purpose under the sun. Presumably all the photos on the Flickr account have been shot by Shealah Craighead who was Trump’s official photographer. Time magazine claims that it is “a role that has been viewed as crucial for the preservation of history.” Yeah, right.
My little personal project involves downloading images from the Flickr account and properly preserving them for history. In my estimation, my colour corrections and retouches vastly improve the historical record. I call them alternative photographs. The most important improvement is the erasure of Donald Trump. I’m not sure how I should approach this. Maybe I should start by producing images that fade him out, like the photo of Marty McFly’s parents in Back to the Future. Later, when people had gotten used to a less Trumpy version of Trump, I’d remove him altogether. This is a bit like pulling down statues, but without all the sweat and yelling.
