Photoshop Disasters and the Fantasy of Picture Perfection
Photoshop Disasters is a funny weblog that collects flawed design elements in advertisements and elsewhere (like the above image from a Sears Catalog).
The accidental amputations, bizarre hands, and other forms of freakish anatomical blunders strike a viewer as uncanny when you spot them in what would otherwise be a “picture perfect” advertisement. We always already understand that advertising is manipulative and fake, and yet when the flaw appears, the optical illusion is shattered — the collision of consumerist fantasy against marketing reality is sometimes felt as a return of a repressed desire.
Michael Arnzen is an award-winning author of horror fiction and an English professor at Seton Hill University, where he has taught writing since 1999. His trophy case includes four Bram Stoker Awards and an International Horror Guild Award for his often funny, always disturbing stories. Join his social network at michaelarnzen.com.
Sad to hear that @microcosms editor and horror writer/poet Stephen M. Wilson has passed. His poetry lives on. http://t.co/sTj4sx8XBa - 2 days ago
Latest posts by Michael Arnzen (see all)
- VIDEO: Arnzen Lecture on The Popular Uncanny at Neumann University - 03/14/2013
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05/20/2013 at 9:55 am 
05/11/2013 at 6:32 pm 
[...] (UK) anti-second hand smoke campaign stunned me for a moment, with its visual echo of my recent post about the website, Photoshop Disasters. [Via the excellent [...]
This just in: Their Nov 26th 2008 post includes a hilarious deconstruction of the “phallocentric father figure” who’s not in the picture (but his hand is), as if “leaving a single hand to signify – with profound semiotic irony – the hidden hand of capitalism.” A hilarious academic spoof:
http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/2008/11/photohouse-usa-chapectomy.html