Picture Perfect

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 Republic"and the "Huffington Post".

• Acknowledgments ix INTRODUCTION: The Age of the Photo Op 1 CHAPTER 1: Picture Perfect 41 CHAPTER 2: Photo-Op Politics 67 CHAPTER 3: Contesting Control of the Picture 106 CHAPTER 4: Exposed Images 141 CHAPTER 5: Mythic Pictures and Movie Heroes 187 CHAPTER 6: The Person and the Pose 243 Notes 263 Index 279

"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 "[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 "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 "[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 "[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