Alfred Wertheimer is dead. He invented rock photography

Alfred Wertheimer has died at the age of 85. If you don't know who he was put his name into Google Images and you'll see a unique series of pictures of the young Elvis Presley.

Wertheimer took them during a train journey with Elvis between New York and Memphis in 1956. The pictures show Elvis canoodling with girlfriends, waiting for his meal at a segregated lunch counter, staring out of a train window and hanging about with his extended family at North Audubon Drive.

They are the best set of pictures ever taken of a rock star. That's not just because Elvis was the best subject or because Wertheimer was the best photographer. They're the best set of pictures ever taken of a rock star because Colonel Tom Parker didn't have the presence of mind to cut off the thing that made them great - access.

All the iconic pictures taken of rock stars - early Presley, Dylan, Beatles, Stones, Sex Pistols, Smiths etc - were taken in the days when they were so keen on publicity that they gave access to just about everybody. As soon as they could pick and choose they sought to control their own images and in the process made themselves profoundly dull. That's why there hasn't been a picture of a rock star taken in the last thirty years that packs a fraction of the power and information contained in the one above.

Is this World War I or Photoshop?

Saw this on Twitter yesterday, captioned "World War One battlefield".

If you say so. To me it looks like a cross between War Picture Library and Photoshop.

You don't find a highly composed panoramic view of the battlefield from the second war and camera technology had moved on quite a lot by then. Back in 1915 cameras weren't exactly point-and-shoot. A lot of the most frequently used images were reconstructed, just like lots of the early action newsreels were re-enacted in quarries back in Blighty.

I  always think you can tell real war photography from the fact that the photographer is too terrified to hold the camera steady.

Like this (right). I believe in that.

Why real life is never good enough for glossy magazines

Jezebel claim to have the unretouched pictures of Annie Leibowitz's shoot with Lena Dunham for American Vogue.

If they're to be believed the powers that be have rearranged Dunham, whose whole thing is she doesn't look like a model, so that she looks, well, like a model.

It's very interesting stuff. Head from one shot added to torso from other shot etc. Flesh excised from anywhere the A.D. doesn't wish flesh to be.

I know this kind of thing goes on. In my experience it generally goes on with the enthusiastic approval of the subject.

That's as maybe. Jezebel is puzzled by all this. It says "men are generally allowed to have pores and wrinkles; women are supposed to be perfect". That's true, I suppose, but I can guarantee you that any men who have made it through to the pages of Vogue have had a similar amount of post-production work done on their images. Photoshopping is like the cast of Friends. Once one character got thinner, the others had to get thinner for fear of appearing fat.

But more than that. If you want to know why art directors and photographers do this kind of thing, let me refer you to that old TV programme where the Comic Strip did the Miner's Strike. You may remember they had Al Pacino playing Arthur Scargill.

Anyway, the most telling scene in that film, one of the most telling scenes in all TV, came when the director and art director stood in the middle of a proposed location, which was a genuine mining town somewhere in South Yorkshire.

They looked sceptically up and down, scanning the video store, the Indian takeaway and Spar grocer. Eventually the art director, clearly dissatisfied, turned away.

As he went he uttered the line which tells you everything you need to know about the image-monger's trade. "It doesn't say 'mining town' to me."