Fake Celebrity
Wired has an article on
The Fake Detective, a retired guy whose hobby is to point out doctored photographs of celebrities, specifically celebrities with visible nipples. He documents not only the original celebrity photo but also the nude used to splice together the fake. Very entertaining, considering the people who make the photos generally don't care about passing them off for real. The fake-detective.com site has a big warning to not link to his page, I suppose to keep his pages from becoming a major download target. Now that it's in
Wired we'll see how successful he is. There are over 300 nude celebrities on there. Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jennifer Aniston and Jennifer Love Hewitt appear a lot, apparently because their faces are symmetrical, which allows for mirroring when the shadows don't align correctly. Add this to the research that shows symmetry as a factor of perceived beauty. Signals good genes
and works well in Photoshop.
The business of making fakes picks up on a theme in the issue about open source. It's not spelled out precisely, but it's been said before, that all these coders, hackers and Photoshoppers who work through the night work for nothing other than recognition. That is, if you can't get the executive title, the mansion and the Ferrari, then maybe you can get something else, maybe something bigger. Real, deserved respect, or as our friend David Yoon says, Respeckt. Church.
* Ray, 10/12/2003 11:15:00 PM
