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.
[...] (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