Photography

Gallery of airbrushed photos

Posted by Joel Martinsen, December 26, 2006 11:01 PM

CR photo retouched to remove obstructions in front of Mao's portrait and to patch a hole in a banner.

The blog Pro State in Flames has posted a gallery of photos manipulated to serve prevailing political winds in the Soviet Union and China. Captions are in Chinese, but even without any annotations it's still fun to identify the holes and watch how Stalin comes and goes - an extensive display of cropping, airbrushing, and in the above image, badly-executed white-out.

Also: Can anyone confirm some strange behavior with the Baidu image search? As I was looking for the altered image of Hu Jintao shaking hands with Deng Xiaoping (later found here), I discovered that Baidu returns no results for the current president. Jiang Zemin too is completely filtered (a search for Wen Jiabao, however, results in pages filled with his beaming face).

The strange thing is this: the first search I made for 胡锦涛, it was Kelly Chen who turned up on the results page. Subsequent searches returned "No results," but after a few attempts searching with extra words added, Jay Chou came up (screenshot; note that the keyword in the address bar is different from that in the status bar URL, which corresponds to the "查看更多" link). Then "A-mei", "Shennongjia" and "Wang Yan". Plugging in Jiang Zemin and various extra characters eventually pulled up this result page, for "spicy photos".

This doesn't happen every time - maybe once for every ten attempts - and it's not reproducible for any given search. It seems completely random, but occasionally the "Sorry, no results" page will be replaced images of something completely unrelated. Is it egao, or just a bug in Baidu's keyword filter?

There are currently 7 Comments for Gallery of airbrushed photos.

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Comments on Gallery of airbrushed photos

It must be keyword filter,you can try "胡总书记"

Posted by: GreatBear | December 27, 2006 12:36 AM

Joel, this means that you are going out of your mind or else you've been in China for too long ... in jest, of course.

Posted by: eswn | December 27, 2006 12:54 AM

Compare Zhang Dali's A Second History

Posted by: carlos | December 27, 2006 2:24 AM

Hmm... I think that the real explanation lies with the demonses. I mean, if I were a soul trapped for eterntity in some electrical wiring, I would be messing with people by giving them dirty pictures randomly during their image searches... wouldn't you?

Posted by: juhuacha | December 27, 2006 10:19 AM

Come to think of it, this is actually a nice way to simulate a random image search - plug in old Jiang's name, press "search" a few times, and voila! random photos.

Posted by: Joel | December 27, 2006 9:23 PM

First try, picture of a monkey.

Second try, 抱歉，没有找到与胡锦涛相关的图片。

Third try, spaces, 胡锦涛, lots of Hu.

Posted by: Kevin S. | December 28, 2006 6:50 AM

Try putting a space between each Chinese character.

Works for Zhao Ziyang, the Mainland China airbrush poster boy.

Posted by: Spelunker | December 31, 2006 11:19 PM