The touching hug photo from Ferguson protests is a blatant lie | Jonathan Jones

It’s absurd that a nation’s new, yet old, encounter with its most destructive division can be summed up by this soppy picture of a tearful hug

The camera is a superb liar. It only shows one moment, and has no obligation to explain the bigger picture behind it. The selective use of photographs can therefore replace truth with whatever visual detail we choose to fix on. Horror or schmaltz, the effect is the same, to simplify reality and turn a story into a deceptively straightforward image.

In the 1930s and 1940s the dishonest manipulation of photographs was a speciality of state propagandists. Backroom technicians in totalitarian darkrooms removed unwanted faces from pictures and turned emotive images into posters. Today, we don’t need propaganda machines to deceive us because we can make hypocritical and self-manipulating choices ourselves just by “liking” the pictures that show us what we want to see and ignoring those that are more awkward.

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