Hey! It’s not a total hitpiece! Various digs aside, there’s a decent article this week in the Failing New York Times about Peter Duke, a photographer who is sympathetic to the alt-right and alt-lite.

Duke believes in the primacy of visual culture, and most right-wing figures, he says, don’t take enough care to make themselves look good. Newt Gingrich, he tells me, is “disheveled”; Steve Bannon is a “schlub”; Trump’s hair is “problematic.” At the same time, he thinks left-leaning media outlets — which is to say, just about anything other than Breitbart News and The Drudge Report — go out of their way to present the right in a negative way.

To prove his point, Duke edited a photo of the author in the same way that news outlets do to right-wing people. The NYT conveniently left it out of the final article, but Duke helpfully posted it to twitter. 

via @peterdukephoto

Personally I kinda like the edited version better. Apparently I like people to look “ghoulish and depleted,” but I think it has more depth, and therefore more interest. Frankly, the author looks more interesting in Duke’s edited photo, and more like a standard-issue beta male in the “normal” one.

It is true, though, that most right-wing political figures don’t present themselves in a visually compelling way. Milo and Ann Coulter aside, most talking heads seems to think that their ideas will stand on their own merit, with no assistance needed from the ethos of the speaker.

Unfortunately, the rest of the world doesn’t work that way.

“There’s this kind of, I think, phony idea that things are objective — when you push the button, that’s the objective reality, and I just don’t think that’s true,” Duke told me, not long ago, on our early evening walk along the bluffs. Duke sees photography as a kind of weapon in the culture wars, and in a way, it may be the perfect medium for a movement like the alt-right, which wants to refashion reality on its own terms. Pictures are, after all, factually malleable vessels that do not present reality as it is but suggest an alternative one as the photographer sees it.

This is the second time in the article that the author insists that the alt-right is creating alternative versions of things (which is true) because the alt-right’s version of reality isn’t true. This is completely false. The alt-right is more aligned with objective reality than the NYC liberal bubble, but to those (like the author) inside that bubble, it doesn’t feel that way.

A photograph can be a “lie that tells the truth,” or it can be 100% deception. Without sympathetic photographers, who know how to wield angles, light, composition and photoshop to our best advantage, the right wing, in any of its forms, is at a severe disadvantage. I’m glad we have Duke on our side. There is much to learn from him.

I must disagree with Duke slightly, though. I think Trump’s hair is genius.

But that is another post for another day.