Recently, I encountered a shocking; (disturbing, rather) image in the April 2001 edition of Time Magazine. It pictured a man, apparently dining on a roasted baby. Since I was so curious about the authenticity of this picture, I tried to find out more about it in the internet. It turned out that it has gone as far as FBI investigation in the UK (they attempted to 'close down' a website featuring this photo, which is completely ridiculous!), as well as its publication on the front page of UK's 'The Independent'.

The man eating a small roast baby turns out to be an 'artist' named Zhu Yu, who performed a conceptual piece called "Eating People" at a Shanghai arts festival last year and the only crime Zhu commit is of eating long pig with orange juice. The baby-eating exhibit has been fabulously successful at upsetting large numbers of people, which is basically what he wanted.

All those hassle... over a fake image! How embarassing!

I was doing an essay for my school project on the notion of 'truth' in photography when I remembered an article from a couple of years back. It was the Weekly World News featuring half-human half-alligator creature, which I've always thought to be a mere manipulated image. Here's what I found out during my research; 'it' was a real creature thingy and 'it' - 'he' is called Jake. Jake is already mummified and was bought by the Marshes back in the 1960s. Jake now sits in a glass case in the Marsh Free Museum in Florida (also the house of other mammal anomalies - such as an eight-legged lamb, a two-headed pig and a shrunken human head). In 1993, The World Weekly News announced: "HALF-ALLIGATOR, HALF-HUMAN FOUND IN FLORIDA SWAMP," and it was said that this creature was captured ALIVE!???? In fact, the World Weekly News 'stole' the picture of the ' beast' from one of Marsh's postcards without any permission.

Sources: The Gaping Maw Chinese Contemporary Art World Weekly News Washington's Outer Limits