Analysis of Item #96: “Friends in a Dorm Room”
http://mith.umd.edu/arguing/admin/items/show/96
While this may look like a picture of Kat Averell and her friends, it is a truly remarkable work of deception. You see Kat on the left, obviously very content and pleased with herself, but when you look closer at the faces of the other girls to the right, you may see something is quite amiss. First, you may notice that her “friend” Angela is leaning a bit too far to her left, away from Kat. They are all, in fact, a little uncomfortable having her in the picture. Why, you may ask, are they so unhappy about taking a picture with their so-called friend? What you don’t know is that Kat Averell is a shifty little schemer. Behind those poor girls’ backs she holds a spray bottle of paint, ready to sabotage any girl if she dare leave the picture. She was so terrified of having nothing to put in her archive that she forced her “friends” to take pictures with her as she held them at paint-point. The smug smile upon her face and the uneasy, forced smiles of the rest of the girls say it all: this was not an act of camaraderie, but an act of desperation.
Analysis of Item #55 “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty”
http://mith.umd.edu/arguing/admin/items/show/55
This book is a fake. Look at the brown paper covering the book. It’s a grocery bag folded and taped over a high school science textbook. She carefully creased the paper at the binding so that it resembles a real book, but the quality of the paper used is much lower than what covers the true Alexander McQueen book. The picture from the front of the book is easily found throughout the internet, such as on this site http://backseatstylers.com/fashionshows/alexander-mcqueen-savage-beauty-exhibition-at-the-met-another-preview/ and many others you can find just by Googling the title. She obviously printed the image out and glued it to the front of the paper cover. Angela obviously did not use the high quality setting on her printer because the image is grainy and fuzzy, unlike the crisp image displayed on the real book’s cover. You can clearly see the uneven edges where she cut the white edges off the paper with sloppy snips on the front and right edges. The right bottom corner is also peeling off the cover despite the measures she took to ensure that they stayed intact. Although this easily fools the observer when seen via digital photograph, anyone able to see the actual book or hold it would quickly discover that it is a fraud.