A recently released photograph of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il was supposed to prove that he's alive and well. Instead, it's raising even more suspicions about his health because the photo seems to be doctored. As the
Times Online notes:
While the legs of his soldiers cast a shadow at a sharp angle, the shadow of the “Dear Leader” is dead straight. In addition, there is a black line running horizontally behind the soldiers’ legs, but it mysteriously disappears behind Mr Kim.
The lack of the black line behind Kim Jong-Il is what confuses me. Why would it have been deleted? The shadow of the soldier to his left falls across that section of the step, and yet it falls at the angle one would expect. If that section of the step was deleted, the photo forgers must have recreated the shadow of the soldier. But it's strange they would have placed the shadow of the soldier at a correct angle and screwed up the Dear Leader's shadow. So perhaps that's how the step behind him really looks. (Thanks, Hudson!)
Comments
The leg shadow is just wrong, though.
Unless he has the godly power to control his shadow, which may be accepted as truth there. 😊
"Why do I keep misreading Dear Leader as Dead Leader?"
You must be confusing him with his father, the (late) Great Leader.
Maybe Kin Jon Ill is the only one really there and the others are all computer simulations!
The black line is something where we can't really tell anything about it.
No, that shadow looks about right for that sort of hat. Look at the shadow of the hat on Kim's right for comparison, and keep in mind that these shadows are not being cast onto a flat surface.
So it could be that his image was pasted in, or maybe not. I don't see anything about the technical aspects of it that cries out without doubt "Hoax!".
The main thing that makes me wonder is that this photo actually does nothing to show that Kim is healthy. Look at it: he's just standing there totally without expression or motion. He could be a corpse that has been propped up somehow. Where are the photos of him walking around and greeting his troops? Shaking hands? Moving under his own power?
Forget the closeup and look at the full shot... Notice anything?
The taller soldiers are all on the sides, with the shortest standing near him. (notice how the line of heads curves down in the center of the picture.)
Now look at Kim Jong-Il's torso in the bottom picture... Notice how he looks like he's about three feet in front of the line? But his feet fall in line with the troops on either side of him.
I think, ill or not, that's him standing there, but the picture was carefully posed and and his legs photo shopped so you wouldn't notice how short he is! (Vain little sucker, ain't he?)
So it seems that Kim wasn't totally comatose for the entire photo session, at least. And here's another of the most recent photos, from the <a >New York Times website</a> (I shrunk it down a little so it would fit here):
There are apparently over a dozen photos released in this latest bunch, but the above two and the one Alex posted are the only ones I'm able to find so far.
And here's a photo released earlier by the North Koreans (from <a >this site</a>):
I couldn't find any information on just when this photo was released, just that it was released "earlier". I got the impression that they were released in October, though. He looks a bit different in that picture than he does in the one Alex posted, so they didn't copy him from this photo. But it shows that the black line thing wasn't all the way across in earlier photos, too, making it more likely that that's just the way the stands are built.
And here's a close-up of that previous picture, from the same website:
Furthermore the BBC, working with a better quality image of the picture we were first looking at, <a >seem to have found some strangeness in the pixels</a>.
It seems as though <a >that is one</a> of his <a >favourite outfits</a>, so they'd have no shortage of photos to copy his image from. And keep in mind that the photos they released are totally undated; instead of editing the photos, they could have simply used pictures taken several years ago.
But the main thing is that the stands seem to be built the same way, and that indentation or whatever along the front seems to be missing in the middle in both pictures. So it seems most likely that the stands are built that way.
That still leaves the problem of the pixels that the BBC pointed out, though.
Black line is there.
Same outfit, different shoes.
Mismatched pixels on top of shoes.(like latest 'photo')
Different soldiers with him.
(that I found courtesy of <a >Spiegel Online</a>)
The problem with that picture is that it only shows a very small field of view. For all we know, he could be standing to the left or right of centre on one of those reviewing stands, which wouldn't put him standing in front of the spot where the black line seems to disappear from. We can't even tell if it's one of the same reviewing stands as in the earlier pictures; it could be a third reviewing stand, that is just built differently. And we just have too many other pictures showing reviewing stands lacking that line continuing through the middle, such as yet another one here:
(from <a >this site</a>)
Thus far all evidence shows that the middle of the bottom row on those sorts of reviewing stands simply lacks the continuation of that line. No evidence clearly shows otherwise. As it is, for that line's absence to be a sign of photo editing we'd have to accept that:
(1) All those other photos I found, and probably a good many others, were also edited similarly.
(2) The people doing the photo editing keep on making the same obvious mistake and not fixing it, which would not be a healthy thing for the photo editors in a place such as North Korea.
(3) In spite of the sloppy errors, the North Korea propaganda people released the photos to the world.
It all just seems highly unlikely compared to the alternative: the stands are just built without a continuous line across the bottom front.
So while it's quite possible that the pictures are faked, none of the stuff about that line shows anything one way or the other about it. And the shadows of the legs is just too inconclusive. We need more evidence to show whether or not the Dear Leader is being added to the photos, and I don't really see us getting that evidence from the small little low-quality copies of the image that I've seen available. We either need somebody else to analyse a better copy for us and find something, or else to figure out some contextual error in the photo (such as noticing that the photo was taken on Oct. 16th, and that Kim Jung-Il was obviously elsewhere that day).