the Ghost Writer

the Ghost Writer

I have been thinking a lot about plagarism lately, as I have had a few images nicked this year, and even an article written about me on a Russian website/magazine, complete with quotes that I never said, to an interviewer I was never in contact with! We are steeped in information overload daily now, and despite all our technological marvels that deliver news and information almost the second it happens, as ever, we are not too concerned with vetting this information for accuracy.

When I added the cathedral background into this image, I was compelled to do a piece about searching for evidence of God, but I think, for now, I have said my piece on my beliefs or rather my disbelief. When I found this Russian piece on me, which was very flattering, but a little inaccurate, it got me thinking about all our news sources and how kneejerk we have become about accepting hearsay as fact, and this led me to thinking about one of the most notorious "news" sources of all time, the Bible, and how so many accept the words within as absolute and factual, without considering the sources of the writing.

So who wrote it? How many? When? How many times has it been translated? This is the trouble with something so ancient and venerated - it becomes immune to skepticism by those that deem it of value. But someone had to write the material, at some point, from oral traditions to the written word, and at a time when so much about the natural world was mysterious and unknown, the opinions of the humans who wrote it had to skew the facts. Even to this day, the Papacy utilizes ghost writers to write the encyclicals released to the faithful. Think about that: the Pope, God's supposed representative on Earth, who is supposedly giving us the words from the Man himself, uses another person to write in his "style."

Ghost Writers have been around since writing began, and everyone from the Pope to Hilary Clinton has used them. Many Tom Clancy novels have not been written by the author himself, but someone approximating his style. It is accepted, it is part of the literary culture, so what's the big deal? My issue is that so many of us accept the Bible as the word of God, but logically, even if the source was the Lord God himself, someone here had to do his writing, and how often do humans get things wrong? How often to we inject our personal opinions into our writing? How often do we check our facts? All these gospels supposedly transmitted to a select few "prophets" and holy men (charlatans) from God himself? How can thier sources be questioned, when they are unprovable and invisible?

We need to consider the source always, especially when the author himself has yet to make an appearance in several millenia!


A Before and After version of this image can be seen on my Facebook page: www.facebook.com/MichaelBilottaPhotography

Model: Ed Barron