Billy Lovelady is NOT leaning over (much) in Altgens 6.

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

On page 11, Alan Ford writes:

Quote

No question in my mind that the Altgens photo was retouched to (at the very least) give Mr. Lovelady a left arm............ 

... followed by two versions of Lovelady in Altgens 6: a very poor-quality version and a very good-quality version. The very poor quality of the former would appear to be due to its being (a copy of a copy of a copy, etc, of) a screen-shot of a TV broadcast from the day of the assassination. The good-quality image has been named Altgens-Groden-cropped.jpg, so I'm assuming it's a scan of the version on page 186 of Robert Groden's The Killing of a President.

Nota bene! According to Groden, he printed his version from the original negative, so we can assume that it's about as accurate a copy as we can expect to find. In Groden's version, the pattern on Lovelady's left sleeve matches the pattern on the front of his shirt. The obvious and utterly mundane conclusion has to be that Lovelady was wearing a long-sleeved shirt with a rectangular light and dark pattern. In other words, what's all the fuss about?

But! Mr Ford seems to be implying that the rubbishy, distorted version is more accurate than Groden's far superior version, and that the plain, light-toned sleeve that we see in the rubbishy version must therefore belong to Carl Jones, who in other images can be seen wearing a plain, light-coloured shirt with plain, light-coloured sleeves.

And! That the pattern on Lovelady's sleeve in Groden's version was painted in by a nefarious photo-faker!

Readers! (I like Mr Ford's writing style! It's addictive!) Why would anyone conclude that a poor-quality version should be preferred to a much higher-quality version? I'd guess Mr Ford thinks that because the obviously inferior version was broadcast soon after the assassination it must be more accurate than the obviously superior version that was made years later.

No! That doesn't follow at all! The plain sleeve is simply representative of the overall poor quality of that image. The degradation is the result of the limitations of the original TV broadcast, and of the copying process (and possibly some innocent retouching of the type commonly carried out by newspapers, though I'm not convinced that we need to assume that).

Because! When looking at a copy of a copy (etc) of a photograph and determining how accurate the copy is likely to be, we need to consider the process that produced that copy. The process of making a print from an original negative, and then reproducing that image in a book printed on good-quality paper, will normally result in an image that retains much of its original detail. The process of broadcasting a small hand-held photo on a 1960s TV system would by itself have stripped out much of the detail in that photo.

Also! Before alleging photo-fakery, we need to demonstrate that the fakery in question was practical and plausible. In Groden's version, the entire image, not just the sleeve, contains a greater tonal range, and hence a greater amount of detail, than does the TV screen-shot. If the sleeve was painted in, so must the front of Lovelady's shirt, as well as his face and the surrounding area, not to mention the same elements in all the other versions that are of better quality than the TV screen shot image.

Wow! There must have been a whole team of nefarious photo-fakers at work over many years, carefully adding varying amounts of detail into numerous digital copies of the Altgens 6 photo! Were they, one wonders, the same photo-fakers who were busy replacing Oswald's head in Altgens 6 with the head of Billy Lovelady, not to mention painting back-to-front cars and eight-foot-tall spectators in the Zapruder film and altering most of the other home movies and photos? Or were the Oswald head-fakers a separate team from the Zapruder-fakers and the Lovelady sleeve-fakers? So many unanswered questions!

[Sandy Larsen]

59 minutes ago, Jeremy Bojczuk said:

On page 11, Alan Ford writes:

... followed by two versions of Lovelady in Altgens 6: a very poor-quality version and a very good-quality version. The very poor quality of the former would appear to be due to its being (a copy of a copy of a copy, etc, of) a screen-shot of a TV broadcast from the day of the assassination. The good-quality image has been named Altgens-Groden-cropped.jpg, so I'm assuming it's a scan of the version on page 186 of Robert Groden's The Killing of a President.

Nota bene! According to Groden, he printed his version from the original negative, so we can assume that it's about as accurate a copy as we can expect to find. In Groden's version, the pattern on Lovelady's left sleeve matches the pattern on the front of his shirt. The obvious and utterly mundane conclusion has to be that Lovelady was wearing a long-sleeved shirt with a rectangular light and dark pattern. In other words, what's all the fuss about?

But! Mr Ford seems to be implying that the rubbishy, distorted version is more accurate than Groden's far superior version, and that the plain, light-toned sleeve that we see in the rubbishy version must therefore belong to Carl Jones, who in other images can be seen wearing a plain, light-coloured shirt with plain, light-coloured sleeves.

And! That the pattern on Lovelady's sleeve in Groden's version was painted in by a nefarious photo-faker!

Readers! (I like Mr Ford's writing style! It's addictive!) Why would anyone conclude that a poor-quality version should be preferred to a much higher-quality version? I'd guess Mr Ford thinks that because the obviously inferior version was broadcast soon after the assassination it must be more accurate than the obviously superior version that was made years later.

No! That doesn't follow at all! The plain sleeve is simply representative of the overall poor quality of that image. The degradation is the result of the limitations of the original TV broadcast, and of the copying process (and possibly some innocent retouching of the type commonly carried out by newspapers, though I'm not convinced that we need to assume that).

Because! When looking at a copy of a copy (etc) of a photograph and determining how accurate the copy is likely to be, we need to consider the process that produced that copy. The process of making a print from an original negative, and then reproducing that image in a book printed on good-quality paper, will normally result in an image that retains much of its original detail. The process of broadcasting a small hand-held photo on a 1960s TV system would by itself have stripped out much of the detail in that photo.

Also! Before alleging photo-fakery, we need to demonstrate that the fakery in question was practical and plausible. In Groden's version, the entire image, not just the sleeve, contains a greater tonal range, and hence a greater amount of detail, than does the TV screen-shot. If the sleeve was painted in, so must the front of Lovelady's shirt, as well as his face and the surrounding area, not to mention the same elements in all the other versions that are of better quality than the TV screen shot image.

Wow! There must have been a whole team of nefarious photo-fakers at work over many years, carefully adding varying amounts of detail into numerous digital copies of the Altgens 6 photo! Were they, one wonders, the same photo-fakers who were busy replacing Oswald's head in Altgens 6 with the head of Billy Lovelady, not to mention painting back-to-front cars and eight-foot-tall spectators in the Zapruder film and altering most of the other home movies and photos? Or were the Oswald head-fakers a separate team from the Zapruder-fakers and the Lovelady sleeve-fakers? So many unanswered questions!

 

Nope.

(That's my impersonation of Bill Brown.)

These are from a very high quality copy of Altgens 6:

 

 

There is absolutely no pattern on what you believe to be Lovelady's left sleeve. The reason being that it is not Lovelady's left sleeve... it is Carl Jones's raised right arm. He wore a light-colored long-sleeved shirt, but there are at least two photos of him that shows that he had pushed his cuffs back.

If Groden's photo has a plaid pattern, it is because he was hoodwinked. (Or he isn't being forthright. Does he have any history of faking certain things?)

That's my story and I'm sticking by it. (That's my impersonation of Ben Cole.)

BTW, look at what Pat said about it:

"JFK was retouched but the Jones Arm was still there."

Source:

 

[Alan Ford]

3 hours ago, Jeremy Bojczuk said:

On page 11, Alan Ford writes:

... followed by two versions of Lovelady in Altgens 6: a very poor-quality version and a very good-quality version [...]

Great post, Mr. Bojczuk! 👍

Stylistically, at least. To bring the content up to the level of style, you'd need to ditch

a) recourse to strawman argument

b) naivety

c) reliance on the expert authority of Mr. Groden

d) that rash decision to throw away your spectacles...........

-----------------

Incidentally! You might take this heartfelt rhetorical question of yours--------"Why would anyone conclude that a poor-quality version should be preferred to a much higher-quality version?"---------and ask your PM-in-Darnell=LHO pals for their thoughts..........

👍

 

 

[Alan Ford]

23 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

As far as Altgens 6, I think we can suspect that once word got out that there was a figure on the steps who looked like Oswald, that some tool at the AP thought they could sell more photos if the Lovelady image was unobstructed, and turned Jones' arm into Lovelady's shirt.

How would someone at the AP have even known how Mr. Lovelady's plaid shirt sleeve was meant to look?

[Pat Speer]

1 hour ago, Alan Ford said:

How would someone at the AP have even known how Mr. Lovelady's plaid shirt sleeve was meant to look?

They didn't. It appears to me that someone just filled in the blank space of Jones' arm to make it fit the shirt behind it. And that this re-touching was just business as usual. As demonstrated on the Miller photo thread this kind of re-touching, once done at the national level, had a life of its own. The news service acquires a negative. It sends out a wire of this negative to subscribers for use in their original articles. But the subscribers are free to add to and crop these images as they see fit. Then, sometimes, a national news story is put out including a higher res version of the photo--that may or may not include alterations. This then becomes the file copy that papers and mags use for every article till the end of time. As stated, the Miller photo thread drove Gary Mack crazy because I was able to prove that at least one (and presumably a number) of the photos widely disseminated by the news services and sixth flor were altered by their first publication, and that no unaltered version outside a single instance had been published in the years since. This drove Mack crazy, to the extent he came to insist that the obviously drawn in foot outline on the photo was the original image, at that the clearly original image as published in the SEP was drawn in. 

[Pat Speer]

4 hours ago, Jeremy Bojczuk said:

On page 11, Alan Ford writes:

... followed by two versions of Lovelady in Altgens 6: a very poor-quality version and a very good-quality version. The very poor quality of the former would appear to be due to its being (a copy of a copy of a copy, etc, of) a screen-shot of a TV broadcast from the day of the assassination. The good-quality image has been named Altgens-Groden-cropped.jpg, so I'm assuming it's a scan of the version on page 186 of Robert Groden's The Killing of a President.

Nota bene! According to Groden, he printed his version from the original negative, so we can assume that it's about as accurate a copy as we can expect to find. In Groden's version, the pattern on Lovelady's left sleeve matches the pattern on the front of his shirt. The obvious and utterly mundane conclusion has to be that Lovelady was wearing a long-sleeved shirt with a rectangular light and dark pattern. In other words, what's all the fuss about?

But! Mr Ford seems to be implying that the rubbishy, distorted version is more accurate than Groden's far superior version, and that the plain, light-toned sleeve that we see in the rubbishy version must therefore belong to Carl Jones, who in other images can be seen wearing a plain, light-coloured shirt with plain, light-coloured sleeves.

And! That the pattern on Lovelady's sleeve in Groden's version was painted in by a nefarious photo-faker!

Readers! (I like Mr Ford's writing style! It's addictive!) Why would anyone conclude that a poor-quality version should be preferred to a much higher-quality version? I'd guess Mr Ford thinks that because the obviously inferior version was broadcast soon after the assassination it must be more accurate than the obviously superior version that was made years later.

No! That doesn't follow at all! The plain sleeve is simply representative of the overall poor quality of that image. The degradation is the result of the limitations of the original TV broadcast, and of the copying process (and possibly some innocent retouching of the type commonly carried out by newspapers, though I'm not convinced that we need to assume that).

Because! When looking at a copy of a copy (etc) of a photograph and determining how accurate the copy is likely to be, we need to consider the process that produced that copy. The process of making a print from an original negative, and then reproducing that image in a book printed on good-quality paper, will normally result in an image that retains much of its original detail. The process of broadcasting a small hand-held photo on a 1960s TV system would by itself have stripped out much of the detail in that photo.

Also! Before alleging photo-fakery, we need to demonstrate that the fakery in question was practical and plausible. In Groden's version, the entire image, not just the sleeve, contains a greater tonal range, and hence a greater amount of detail, than does the TV screen-shot. If the sleeve was painted in, so must the front of Lovelady's shirt, as well as his face and the surrounding area, not to mention the same elements in all the other versions that are of better quality than the TV screen shot image.

Wow! There must have been a whole team of nefarious photo-fakers at work over many years, carefully adding varying amounts of detail into numerous digital copies of the Altgens 6 photo! Were they, one wonders, the same photo-fakers who were busy replacing Oswald's head in Altgens 6 with the head of Billy Lovelady, not to mention painting back-to-front cars and eight-foot-tall spectators in the Zapruder film and altering most of the other home movies and photos? Or were the Oswald head-fakers a separate team from the Zapruder-fakers and the Lovelady sleeve-fakers? So many unanswered questions!

I sympathize, Jeremy. But this material was all dredged up a decade ago in the Miller thread. The news agencies routinely altered photos both at the local level and national level. Heck, this was even covered in the WC hearings, when Shaneyfelt was forced to explain why there were so many alternate versions of the BYP in the press..

As far as Groden, it's doubtful he's seen the original negative to any news agency photo. Within hours or days they put out a copy for customer use--he probably saw one of those--but the originals are locked in a vault. 

[Jean Ceulemans]

4 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

I sympathize, Jeremy. But this material was all dredged up a decade ago in the Miller thread. The news agencies routinely altered photos both at the local level and national level. Heck, this was even covered in the WC hearings, when Shaneyfelt was forced to explain why there were so many alternate versions of the BYP in the press..

As far as Groden, it's doubtful he's seen the original negative to any news agency photo. Within hours or days they put out a copy for customer use--he probably saw one of those--but the originals are locked in a vault. 

Pat, could you provide a link to the Miller thread, I've tried searching this forum but it's a drag..  I only have "Miller", perhaps you have other keywords that could help me finding it here somewhere

[Pat Speer]

15 minutes ago, Jean Ceulemans said:

Pat, could you provide a link to the Miller thread, I've tried searching this forum but it's a drag..  I only have "Miller", perhaps you have other keywords that could help me finding it here somewhere

This looks like it. There were probably some spin-offs

https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/7226-photo-alteration-by-the-media/

To be clear, I was eventually convinced by Bill Miller that the foot was Clint Hill's LEFT foot. It appears that it was originally believed to have been JFK's right foot, and altered accordingly. 

I brought up this ghost to make the point that some photo "improvements" are still in the record, in no small part due to the lack of access to original negatives. 

Edited October 31, 2023 by Pat Speer

[Alan Ford]

6 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

They didn't. It appears to me that someone just filled in the blank space of Jones' arm to make it fit the shirt behind it. And that this re-touching was just business as usual. As demonstrated on the Miller photo thread this kind of re-touching, once done at the national level, had a life of its own. 

Sure, Mr. Speer, but how would the AP person even know Mr. Lovelady was in long sleeves? Even FBI seemed to have been clueless about Mr. Lovelady's shirt in late-Feb '64 (to interpret charitably the photography-session fiasco).

Ah yes, Mr. Mack. He came to think he owned the case!

[Pat Speer]

2 minutes ago, Alan Ford said:

Sure, Mr. Speer, but how would the AP person even know Mr. Lovelady was in long sleeves? Even FBI seemed to have been clueless about Mr. Lovelady's shirt in late-Feb '64 (to interpret charitably the photography-session fiasco).

Ah yes, Mr. Mack. He came to think he owned the case!

They just did what felt right, just as they guessed about the foot in the Miller photo, and JFK's appearance in the numerous altered versions of Altgens 6, and the appearance of the rifle scope in the back yard photos. There's even a version out there of the Moorman photo in which one of the motorcycle cops was turned into a nurse. 

The media doesn't care about the truth as much as it cares about if something looks right on the page. I get into this on my website. Virtually all the copies of the Jackson and Beers photos showing Oswald's murder were cropped to remove Will Fritz--the bodyguard who'd strayed too far ahead to guard any body. Were they covering for Fritz? Or did they simply think it "better" if their audience was led to focus on the physical relationship of murderer to victim? In any event, the media's notion of what makes a good picture is different than ours. 

[Jean Ceulemans]

4 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

This looks like it. There were probably some spin-offs

https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/7226-photo-alteration-by-the-media/

To be clear, I was eventually convinced by Bill Miller that the foot was Clint Hill's LEFT foot. It appears that it was originally believed to have been JFK's right foot, and altered accordingly. 

I brought up this ghost to make the point that some photo "improvements" are still in the record, in no small part due to the lack of access to original negatives. 

Thanks, and wow 2006 !  

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

Sandy Larsen writes:

Quote

These are from a very high quality copy of Altgens 6:

Sandy's version is better than some but is noticeably inferior to the Groden version. Compare it to the second image that Alan supplied, which I assume is a scan taken from Groden's book. There's more detail in Alan's Groden-sourced version than in Sandy's version, and the actual book's printed version is more detailed still.

In the superior-quality images, the pattern on the sleeve matches the pattern on the front of the shirt. In the inferior-quality images, the pattern on the sleeve isn't so obvious, or isn't there at all. This is exactly what we should expect to see if all the images are authentic. The quality of the copying process determines the amount of detail that will have been lost and the anomalies that will have been generated.

To begin with the assertion that the inferior-quality images depicted the scene as it really was, and then to conclude that the extra detail in the superior-quality images must therefore be due to nefarious alteration, is perverse. At the very least, the claim needs to be supported by an argument that's a bit stronger than "this photo contains details that contradict my theory, so it must have been altered".

Furthermore!

Was I correct in suggesting that Mr Ford really did think that the cruddy, degraded TV image was more trustworthy than the Groden image simply because the former has been around longer than the latter?

And!

That Mr Ford gave no thought to the different physical processes which might have resulted in these two images of very different quality?

Because!

If so, that would make two instances of very sloppy thinking, which more often than not leads to erroneous conclusions.

Or!

If he had thought of those things, why then did he appear to claim that the obviously degraded version was accurate and that the detailed version had been altered?

Also!

There is an interesting discussion of Mr Ford's theory (or theories) here, which he may find of interest:

https://reopenkennedycase.forumotion.net/t2793p75-prayer-man-with-a-rounded-collar

Pat Speer writes:

Quote

The news agencies routinely altered photos both at the local level and national level.

Yes, it's true that they often did more than simply touch up dust spots and other minor blemishes, and that such alterations were done innocently. But Alan and Sandy are claiming that Lovelady's left sleeve was painted over Carl Jones's arm for nefarious reasons.

Exactly what those nefarious reasons are, I'm still not sure, since Sandy's theory appears to differ from Alan's theory, and Alan's theory today appears to differ from Alan's theory yesterday, and all three will probably differ from Alan's theory tomorrow.*

The main problem is that any theory which depends upon a photograph or film having been altered by conspirators really needs a solid demonstration that the image has indeed been altered. Here, the raw material consists of poor-quality copies of the Altgens 6 photo and the Wiegman film, and the claims of alteration are being made by people who seem not to appreciate that poor-quality copies often contain visual anomalies that are not the result of nefarious alteration.

That's why I'd like Alan to tell us whether he really does think that because the TV image was broadcast on the day of the assassination it must be more accurate than Groden's print from years later. If that is indeed what he thinks, we'll know to apply a large helping of salt to his interpretations of what he sees in other poor-quality images.

P.S. Mr Ford's reliance on faked photos and films may be on shaky ground, but his account of the curtain rods on the 'a new look ...' thread is very promising! Allegations of alteration or lack of authenticity are far more plausible when applied to written documents than to photographic evidence.

--

* Tomorrow's theory will probably involve Oswald running into the road, waving a Confederate flag at the Yankee president, then handing the flag to Sarah Stanton, who isn't sure what to do with it and hands it to Billy Lovelady, who slinks over to the mailbox and tries to stuff the flag inside the mailbox as he had been instructed to do before the assassination by his fellow conspirators Bill Shelley and Elvis Presley, only to be prevented from doing so by Officer Baker, who isn't sure what to do with it either and hands the flag to Roy Truly, who also isn't sure what to do with it and hands the flag to the chap in the light-coloured cowboy hat, who is actually a wizard, and the cowboy-hatted wizard magically transforms the flag into a raincoat which he drapes over his shoulder and takes into the building. What happens to the magic raincoat-flag after that will depend on how we interpret a series of blobs in a different poor-quality photo.

[Alan Ford]

1 hour ago, Jeremy Bojczuk said:

Allegations of alteration or lack of authenticity are far more plausible when applied to written documents than to photographic evidence.

-----------Okay, boys, feel free to intimidate witnesses, put words in the suspect's mouth, fake fingerprint & ballistic evidence, disappear pesky items, sanitize the documentary record, and all the other usual stuff. But I want to make one thing absolutely clear: you do not, I repeat NOT, have permission to monkey with any images.

-----------Even if it means letting folks discover Oswald's alibi?

-----------Yes. Even then. This is an ethical investigation, and the visual record of the assassination is a sacred part of our nation's history.

[Sandy Larsen]

1 hour ago, Jeremy Bojczuk said:

But Alan and Sandy are claiming that Lovelady's left sleeve was painted over Carl Jones's arm for nefarious reasons.

 

No, I've never said that. What I've said is that that arm belongs to Carl Jones. And that, for some reason, Groden's copy grew a plaid pattern.

 

[Sandy Larsen]

22 minutes ago, Alan Ford said:

-----------Okay, boys, feel free to intimidate witnesses, put words in the suspect's mouth, fake fingerprint & ballistic evidence, disappear pesky items, sanitize the documentary record, and all the other usual stuff. But I want to make one thing absolutely clear: you do not, I repeat NOT, have permission to monkey with any images.

-----------Even if it means letting folks discover Oswald's alibi?

-----------Yes. Even then. This is an ethical investigation, and the visual record of the assassination is a sacred part of our nation's history.

 

I'll bet that even Jeremy and the boys at ROKC could believe that somebody monkeyed around with the the Darnell clip at the SFM. If they discovered that Hackerott was right about the feminine collar.