Picture Perfect - by Kiku Adatto (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

We say the camera doesn't lie, but we also know that pictures distort and deceive. In Picture Perfect, Kiku Adatto brilliantly examines the use and abuse of images today. Ranging from family albums to Facebook, political campaigns to popular movies, images of war to pictures of protest. Adatto reveals how the line between the person and the pose, the real and the fake, news and entertainment is increasingly blurred. New technologies make it easier than ever to capture, manipulate, and spread images. But even in the age of the Internet, we still seek authentic pictures and believe in the camera's promise to document, witness, and interpret our lives.

From the Back Cover

"Picture Perfect is perfect. The thoroughness and patience and precision of the research dumbfound me! Kiku Adatto has again provided us with a valuable tool for the continuing assessment of our media."--Walter Cronkite

"Tired of being manipulated by politicians and image consultants? Then read Kiku Adatto's brilliant, revealing book. Picture Perfect is pure consumer protection for good citizens."--Larry J. Sabato, author of A More Perfect Constitution

"Images are more important to our lives, both private and public, than ever before. Kiku Adatto's narrative, rich with evocative details, helps us understand how this has happened, and what it means for our future."--Robert D. Putnam, author of Bowling Alone

"Kiku Adatto's Picture Perfect is a book every journalist must read if we are to begin to truly understand ourselves and our world--and if we are to avoid the deadly mistake of Othello, who uncritically believed what he saw."--Bill Kovach, Project for Excellence in Journalism

"With rare insight and acuity, Kiku Adatto dispels the mystifications of a media age in which vital information is obscured by the opportunism of the photo op, and reality is too often the victim of the manipulations of Photoshop. This is an empowering book."--Homi K. Bhabha, author of The Location of Culture

"Picture Perfect is our most elegant, comprehensive, and current study of media and politics. Masterfully weaving together accounts of photographs, movies, television news, and the Internet, Adatto has written a profound reflection on the meaning of images in our public and private lives."--Jeffrey Abramson, author of We, the Jury

Review Quotes

"Picture Perfect shows how television's obsession with pictures is part of a much larger problem--modern American culture's fascination with images, real and manufactured."---Bob Schieffer, CBS News, Washington Monthly

"[Adatto] jolted the media establishment by . . . documenting the 'shrinking sound bite'. . . . The most damaging paradox of modern political coverage, she argues, is that TV reporters and producers, having inflated politicians to posed perfection, are then irresistibly tempted to magnify their every flaw and 'puncture the picture.'"---Pamela Constable, Boston Globe

"[A] lively exploration of our picture-dominated media. . . . We are living in an image-controlled world where reality and artifice have merged and we are all conspiring in our own deception."---Sally Feldman, Times Higher Education

"[A] lucid and original book on the 'new image consciousness in American culture.' Drawing on television, photography and cinema, [Adatto] dissects several curious ironies related to image-making. Not least is the love-hate relationship that has characterized the visual era from its infancy."---Carl Session Stepp, American Journalism Review

"[S]uperb analysis. . . . [N]etwork news has increasingly treated presidential campaigns as artifice and, by doing so, has made them more artificial."---James Q. Wilson, New Republic

"In this engrossing analysis of modern imagery, Adatto chronicles the rise of America's 'photo-op culture' and the explosion of social networking sites, image-conscious photography and the guerilla war between gaffe-seeking journalists and self-aware politicians. This book is an admirable analysis of the role of the image in modern culture and an eloquent defense of why words still matter."-- "Publishers Weekly"

About the Author

Kiku Adatto is a Scholar in Residence at Harvard University's Humanities Center. Her writings on culture, politics, and the media have appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, the New Republicand the Huffington Post.