and the two shall become one

Original photo (top) from Life of Elvis

"In the two-room shotgun house built by his father in readiness for the birth, Jesse Garon Presley, his identical twin brother, was delivered 35 minutes before him, stillborn." — Wikipedia

When I was a lad, every week my Uncle John (in Liverpool) would send us a rolled up bundle of Daily Mirrors (along with the Bootle Times, a suburban Liverpool weekly that was full of back-burner info about this up-and-coming local rock band, the Beatles).
     It was around the time of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann's trial in Israel and I have a distinct memory of a "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" Daily Mirror article that used an effective image of the mass murderer Eichmann to illustrate Hannah Arendt's famous insights about "the banality of evil" in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem.
     By making a mirror image copy of the photo and superimposing each half of it onto copies of the original, the newspaper's production department created a "Evil Eichmann" and a "Good Eichmann."
     The pure, bilateral symmetry of a child's face is something that changes as we mature (for many reasons)— a fact that was exploited to produce the dramatic effect in the Daily Mirror back in 1962. But the pictures (above) of Elvis Presley when he was eight years old are particularly interesting because they show this asymmetry at such a young age.
     Facial asymmetry also explains why so many people don't like photos of themselves. We are used to seeing a mirror image of our own faces; a right-reading image in a photograph always seems a bit alien to us.

Adolph Eichmann (from: Wirtualna Polkska)

More face photograph manipulations here...

"Studies have shown that there is surprising agreement about what makes a face attractive. Symmetry is at the core, along with youthfulness; clarity or smoothness of skin; and vivid color, say, in the eyes and hair. There is little dissent among people of different cultures, ethnicities, races, ages and gender."— Sarah Kershaw, The New York Times
Read more...