At Penn, playing photo hunt for truth

We have now entered the Age of Photoshop. Thanks to this handy-dandy program, people can… We have now entered the Age of Photoshop. Thanks to this handy-dandy program, people can manipulate images to what they want you to see, not what actually happened.

The University of Pennsylvania offered a commencement brochure with a picture of 2003 graduate Arshad Hasan — except his tassel had been digitally altered from a festive rainbow, given to him by the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center at Penn, to a somber black. Penn officials cited his tassel as not being “regulation” as a reason for altering it, despite the fact that he was wearing other adornments that weren’t regulation.

Whatever the reason behind this — political or otherwise — apparently even college brochure photos aren’t safe from spin. Given the Jayson Blair scandal, we’ve learned that no media source, no matter its prestige, is above the occasional (really) bad apple.

But now, photos aren’t safe either. The dictum needs a postscript: “Don’t believe everything you read … or see.”

In a matter of considerably greater gravity, The Boston Globe (which, incidentally, is owned by The New York Times) recently published what its editors believed might be pictures of U.S. soldiers gang-raping an Iraqi woman with the caveat that the photographs “bear no characteristics that would prove the men are U.S. soldiers or that the women are Iraqis … [or] showing they were taken in Iraq,” according to a May 14 article in The Times of London. But these photos, which were traced to American and Hungarian porn Web sites, were published anyway.

So what are we to believe? Even after TasselGate blows over, Penn students will always look at these brochures skeptically. What if, in an effort to attract minorities, the black guy on the cover is really white, and someone clicked the “fill” button in Photoshop? Or just cut him out of another picture and pasted him in, like brochure-artists at the University of Wisconsin did in 2000, adding a black student to an all-white group?

Universities want to attract minorities — except, in Penn’s case, if the students have the audacity to be in both racial and sexual minority groups. But Photoshopping some colors in, and others out, isn’t the way to go.