“More Real Than the Real”: American Image Politics on the Eve of the Election

Julian Zelizer : Nixon privately wondered if photo of Vietnamese girl burned from napalm was staged.

He says Nixon was unable to dismiss horror that photo of Kim Phuc evoked, even as it stoked resistance to the war.

Zelizer says image of girl-and-puppy photo has generated millions of views on social media and elicited responses.

Julian Zelizer : Donald Trump's photo of being grazed by a bullet resonates with other powerful images of Americans confronting and overcoming massive challenges.

Zelizer says the image of the fist and the flag is one of the most iconic photographs in American history.

He says it was an ingeniously “considered” posture, one that the media-savvy politician with reality television experience had the wherewithal to adopt in that moment.

He asks: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality realities".

Fred Ritchininin : The integrity of the photograph as an arbiter of what happened is being undermined in multiple ways.

Samsung ’s head of customer experience, Patrick Chomet , recently suggested in an interview with TechRadar that “actually, there is no such thing as a real picture. There is no real picture, full stop” The unreality of the deepfake has become more frightening than the reality of the nude.