Fakes, Deep and Shallow
Jonas Bendiksen ’s wrote a photojournalistic essay, The Book of Veles. The eponymous Veles is a highly impoverished town in Macedonia; and Bendiksen had taken photos of the town, residents in different parts, and included quotes from some of those folks. Except It was all fake. Nicholas Carr describes what Bendiksen had done: “He shot pictures of empty buildings and deserted cityscapes, and when he returned home to Norway he used video-game-production software to transform the images into three-dimensional renderings. He then downloaded digitized, 3D images of models from the web and placed them inside the scenes, carefully adjusting their poses, clothing, and lighting to make everything look as realistic as possible.” Wait, there’s more. Even the words in the book are fake – Bendiksen didn’t write them. He used computer programs that generate text instead! Bendiksen wasn’t a fraud. Rather, he was trying to test these questions: “I started to ask myself the question