|
Photography
Gallery of airbrushed photosPosted by Joel Martinsen on Tuesday, December 26, 2006 at 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? |
Partner Links
Jobs in China
Recent Comments
Henry on
The Eurasian Face
Caroline W on
Big in China
Michael on
Julia Lovell on translating Lu Xun's complete fiction: "His is an angry, searing vision of China"
Brandon K. on
Clueless academic takes on popular fantasy novels
Media Partners
Visit these sites for the latest China news
China Media Timeline
Major media events over the last three decades
Danwei Model Workers
The latest recommended blogs and new media
 From 2008
Books on China
 The Eurasian Face : Blacksmith Books, a publishing house in Hong Kong, is behind The Eurasian Face, a collection of photographs by Kirsteen Zimmern. Below is an excerpt from the series:
Big in China: An adapted excerpt from Big In China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising A Family, Playing The Blues and Becoming A Star in China, just published this month. Author Alan Paul tells the story of arriving in Beijing as a trailing spouse, starting a blues band, raising kids and trying to make sense of China.
Pallavi Aiyar's Chinese Whiskers: Pallavi Aiyar's first novel, Chinese Whiskers, a modern fable set in contemporary Beijing, will be published in January 2011. Aiyar currently lives in Brussels where she writes about Europe for the Business Standard. Below she gives permissions for an excerpt.
Front Page of the Day
A different newspaper every weekday
From the Vault
Classic Danwei posts
+ Korean history doesn't fly on Chinese TV screens (2007.09): SARFT puts the kibbosh on Korean historical dramas. + Religion and government in an uneasy mix (2008.03): Phoenix Weekly (凤凰周刊) article from October, 2007, on government influence on religious practice in Tibet. + David Moser on Mao impersonators (2004.10): I first became aware of this phenomenon in 1992 when I turned on a Beijing TV variety show and was jolted by the sight of "Mao Zedong" and "Zhou Enlai" playing a game of ping pong. They both gave short, rousing speeches, and then were reverently interviewed by the emcee, who thanked them profusely for taking time off from their governmental duties to appear on the show.
Danwei Archives
Danwei Feeds
Via Feedsky
 (on the mainland)or Feedburner  (blocked in China) Main feed: Main posts (FB has top links) Top Links: Links from the top bar Danwei Jobs: Want ads Danwei Digest: Updated daily, 19:30 |
 |
Chinese media, advertising, and urban life. |
|
tweet
facebook
bookmark
HaoHao
digg
Comments on Gallery of airbrushed photos
It must be keyword filter,you can try "胡总书记"
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.
Compare Zhang Dali's A Second History
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?
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.
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.
Try putting a space between each Chinese character.
Works for Zhao Ziyang, the Mainland China airbrush poster boy.