Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

Can you guess what this is?  I know you know what it is, but can you guess the exact source of it? It's from the October 2, 1964 LIFE magazine. I want you to take a good look at it because it sure looks different from the scans we are used to seeing.

On the left below is the Groden scan, and on the right is from LIFE again. 

Let's consider the differences, and I want to focus mainly on Black Tie Man. His tie is much fainter overall and much narrower, except on the bottom where it's impossibly wide and looks distorted. On both of them, the bottom of the shirt ends suddenly and bluntly, and below it, it just looks like part of the black void. You might assume that it's his black pants, but that would only be an assumption because there are no distinguishing features. Now, here's a big difference: On the left, we are getting a sense of Black Tie Man's neck, a fleshy length between his partial face and his collar. But, on the right, the white of his shirt rises higher, and there is practically no neck at all. Can you see the difference? And speaking of collars, on the right, we are not seeing the collar line that we see on the left. Also on the right, the white of the shirt rises higher and impinges more on Doorman's face. The white goes practically to the edge of his mouth, whereas on the left, it's less. Look closely at the one on the right. That white stripe of Black Tie Man is definitely overlapping Doorman. It's overlapping his shoulder, but it is also overlapping his face, ever so slightly. 

 How is that possible? That guy is behind Doorman. So, how could any part of him get in front of Doorman and overlap him? When have you ever seen such a thing before? Is there another photo like this in the whole world, where a man standing behind is covering up part of a man who is standing in front of him? 

I maintain that some of the details we see in the enlarged crops of the doorway are artificial. I strongly suspect that the collar line seen in the Groden scan isn't real, that Altgens camera did not catch that. And what was the shading mechanism by which the lower part of BT Man's face is illuminated but not the top part? How did the shade line work for that? Presumably, there was shade being cast by the overhang, but why would there be a superior to inferior distinction? Up/down? What are the chances that someone could duplicate that? Very slim I'd say. I own the largest version of the Altgens photo that is sold by the AP, and it looks more like the image on the right than the image on the left.