Obama waving-hand gaffe picture NOT a hoax or a Photoshop after all!
Over the last few hours a photo has begun to circulate on the blogs showing Obama supposedly at the “Open Government Partnership” conference today committing an egregious gaffe by raising his hand to block the face of another world leader.
Here’s a link to the MSNBC photoblog where most bloggers first noticed the image; and here’s the image itself:
[Click on the picture to see it full-size.]
Now, many veterans of the Great Photoshop Wars of 2003-2010 will take one look at this photo and see about a hundred things “wrong” with it. Not only does Obama’s hand seem Photoshopped into the image, but Obama himself seems to have been awkwardly pasted in. In fact, under closer inspection, about half the people in the image appear to have been inserted artificially; in other words, the whole scene looks to be constructed almost from scratch.
But I wondered: Since this photo can be found on an MSNBC site, are they punking the blogs — or did somebody manage to punk MSNBC and pass off a hoax photo as the real thing?
So, following the lead in the image’s credit line — “Allan Tannenbaum-Pool / Getty Images” — I went straight to the supposed source…and to my utter astonishment, I discovered that the image is indeed from Getty Images and can be found on their site:
Getty Images — Title: Obama Meets With World Leaders At The United Nations
Here’s how it appears on the Getty Images page, with their watermark over the picture:
And here’s the official Getty caption:
Caption: NEW YORK – SEPTEMBER 20: U.S. President Barack Obama waves while standing with aother leaders during the Open Government Partnership event at the United Nations September 20, 2011 in New York City.
