As long as the 20th century remains in living memory, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy will continue to draw public interest. A great many Americans feel they still haven’t heard the “whole story” behind what happened on November 22, 1963; a few have dedicated their lives to finding out, growing less inclined to accept the possibility of a lone gunman the deeper they get into the documents. But that gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, does figure directly into some of the material held up as evidence of a conspiracy. Take the “backyard photos” that depict him posing with what was ultimately found to be the very gun used to kill JFK.
Such images would seem strongly to implicate Oswald in the assassination, and the Warren Commission seems to have regarded them in just that way. But for nearly six decades now, some theorists have argued that the backyard photos are fake — an idea that began with Oswald himself, who before his own assassination insisted that he’d never seen them in his life, and that someone had “superimposed” his face onto another body.
The Vox video above lays out the main elements of one particular picture that have been called repeatedly into question: the angles of the shadows, the shape of Oswald’s chin, the length of the gun, and Oswald’s unusual posture.
“In the 1960s and 1970s, forensic experts tried just about everything to test the authenticity of this photo,” says the video’s narrator. They couldn’t find any evidence of fakery, but they didn’t have the 21st-century technology at the command of the UC Berkeley School of Information’s Hany Farid, a well-known specialist in the analysis of digital images. Farid and a team of researchers reconstructed Oswald’s body and weaponry (though not the copies of The Militant and The Worker, two ideologically opposed newspapers, he brandished in his other hand) and found that everything added up, from the seemingly misaligned shadows cast by the sun to the stability of his odd stance. If there was indeed a conspiracy to kill JFK, then, it wasn’t a conspiracy of proto-Photoshoppers.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Farid’s fancy computer pictures have hoodwinked the whole damned world. Long story short; The plumb line from his center of gravity does not land between his feet as shown. That’s obviously wrong and a lie. Try standing like that yourself (good luck to begin with). Now look down at that spot WHICH IS ENTIRELY IN FRONT OF YOUR BODY. The real spot is in back of your hind foot. People will believe dang near anything if they see a picture of it. Oh wait.
The existence of very directly confessional pictures is entirely at odds with all of Oswald’s denials. It is entirely nonsensical, as is him holding the two newspapers and a rifle with a scope simultaneously. WTF does that?! Nobody, that’s who.
“found that everything added up” It most certainly did not. Did you read it? I did. It’s bullshit: long on jargon and short on reasoning. Where’s the bird’s eye rendering of the body and the dot? Missing, of course. Farid’s paper is proof of only that people are very credulous in regards to computer-generated “evidence”. There’s your real story, cub reporter.
Did you actually watch the Vox video? I did. The 1967 guy couldn’t stand like that either. Even getting close and he made a pained expression.
I’m coming onto all this malarkey fresh in the last two days. Farid’s paper is nothing except an attempt to burnish his academic credentials. Happens all the time. Publish or perish.
It’s a cropped picture.