The original title was:
The Last Tree in Rochina, Brazil
by Luis Bhering
I gave it a different title, altering the title, just as Bhering altered the original photo.
Don’t say “fake” then pat yourself on the back as if you are a warrior for truth and imagine you’ve made the world better by telling dumb people what they can’t figure out without you.
Yes, it’s an altered image. Yes, there are repetitions of city block images but does this alteration completely negate its value? Jean Baudrillard called this sort of thing hyper-reality, more real than real.
My concern with comments like “it’s fake” is that they take a minor point (it’s art) and use it to try to smother all utility from the picture, a picture that could cause people to say “I should plant trees. It’s important, so cities don’t look like that.”
The “truth” is that we are adding 70 million people a year and adding buildings at the rate of hundreds of thousands per year, but we have a net reduction each year in fully grown trees in the hundreds of millions. If we keep doing what we’ve been doing, we will mathematically end up with a last mature tree.
Can you fully capture those truths in one single image? No, you can’t. Thus this digitally altered image is hyper-real, more real than reality.
In another sense, it’s a PARODY. Read The Onion’s brilliant amicus brief to the US Supreme Court for how parody works, why it’s vital to POLITICAL CRITIQUE, and why it should NOT require stating up front that something is a parody.
Please read this as if our lives depend upon understanding this… because they do.