ABSTRACT
In 1917, labor activist Tom Mooney and his wife were indicted on trumped-up charges of blowing up a militaristic parade in San Francisco and causing several deaths. In their defense, the couple offered an apparently air-tight alibi: a photograph of themselves miles away from the site of the detonation at just four minutes before the blast [Fig. 2.1]. Problematically for the defendants, however, the exculpatory feature of the photograph was beyond the naked eye: merely a tiny fleck in the distance. When enlarged several thousand times, this speckle revealed the face of a street clock displaying a time that seemed to exonerate the couple. This blow-up proved far from decisive, though, for earlier in the proceedings, the prosecution had offered its own competing enlargement, and this image demonstrated that amplifying the clock face to the degree proposed by the defense obliterated any legible detail [Fig. 2.2].
