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...

edmund hillary clinton

"One experience that I've been especially interested in is our understanding and experience of pictures. If I show you a picture from a newspaper—for example, a photo of Hillary Clinton—there is a sense in which, when you look at that picture, you see Hillary. There she is, in the picture. Of course, Hillary is not there, so there is an obvious sense in which you don't see Hillary when you look at the picture. There is a sense in which you see her; and a sense in which you don't. She shows up for you, in the picture, even though she is not there. She shows up as not there. Getting clear about this phenomenon is the central empirical and conceptual problem about depiction."[...]
"[...] the use of mirrors to create sensory feedback could provide a therapy for phantom-limb pain. What Ramachandran and others have done is allow somebody who experiences phantom-limb discomfort to look at a mirror and move his good arm but get visual feedback as if he is moving the bad arm. They find that through moving the good arm it's possible to work out a cramp in what is in fact an absent arm. [...]"
—Alva Noë, Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley
Read more...

"[...] But why would the `nalls digging' sensation also disappear along with the spasm? This is even more difficult to explain but one might suppose that the two sensations, nalls digging' and the`clenching', are linked in the brain, even in normal individuals, by a Hebbian learning mechanism so that abolishing one leads to the elimination of the other as well. What we are dealing with here, then, might be a primitive form of sensory learning that could conceivably provide a new way of experimentally approaching morc complex forms of memory and learning in the adult brain.[...]"
— V. S. Ramachandran and D. Rogers-Ramachandran
Read more...