An odd & unexpected connection between House of Leaves and my thesis...

So there I was, reading House of Leaves and procrastinating on my thesis proposal, when I stumbled upon this:

"In 1990 in The New York Times, Andy Grundberg wrote: 'In the future, readers of newspapers and magazines will probably view news pictures more as illustrations than as reportage, since they will be well aware that they can no longer distinguish between a genuine image and one that has been manipulated. Even if news photographers and editors resist the temptations of electronic manipulation, as they are likely to do, the credibility of all reproduced images will be diminished by a climate of reduced expectations. In short, photographs will not seem as real as they one did.'

Also in 1990, Associated Press executive, Vincent Alabiso, acknowledged the power of digital technology and condemned its use to falsify images: 'The electronic darkroom is a highly sophisticated photo editing too. It takes us out of a chemical darkroom where subtle printing techniques such as burning and dodging have long been accepted as journalistically sound. Today these terms are replaced by 'image manipulation' and 'enhancement.' In a time when such broad terms could be misconstrued we need to set limits and restate some basic tenets... The content of photographs will NEVER be changed or manipulatedin any way.'

A year later, the NPPA (National Press Photographers Association) also recognized the power of electronic imaging techniques: 'As journalists we believe the guiding principle of our profession is accuracy: therefore, we believe it is wrong to alter the content of a photograph in a way that deceives the public.'"

I was NOT expecting this out of this book! These are truly great quotes for my thesis, since I'm planning to write on the history of photographic manipulation for political purposes. I hope they are real quotes, though (I remember Johnny Truant saying something at the beginning of the book about how some of Navidson's sources are fictional... I hope these aren't!!! I'm going to do some Googling now.)