This photo is an artwork and not a real German village
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on September 10, 2021 at 05:31
- 4 min read
- By AFP Sri Lanka
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The photo was shared here on Facebook on April 19, 2021.
"A Village in Germany shaped like a fingerprint", reads the photo's caption.
The photo was also shared more than 1,000 times on Facebook here and here alongside a similar claim.
Comments to these posts indicate some social media users thought the photo shows an actual village.
"Awesome!! Do you know the name of that city?" one wrote.
"Amazing village in the world", said another.
However, the claim is false: the photo shows the work of a German artist and not an actual village.
A reverse image search on Google found an identical photo was published on the online portfolio of German artist Jacob Eisinger.
"For the february issue of Modus Magazine I was asked to create a satelite picture kind of artwork showing a fingerprint shaped city to illustrate 'the human touch'", Eisinger wrote.
"Experimenting with cloner objects and dynamic texturing it was a great challenge to figure out the best way to create a crowded place like a city."
Below is a screenshot comparison of the photo in the misleading posts (L) and the artwork featured on Eisinger's online portfolio (R).
Further keyword searches found the artwork was featured on the cover of the February 2015 issue of the Modus magazine.
Eisinger also posted the same photo on his Instagram on February 9, 2017 with the hashtags "#cgi #3d #digitalart".
View this post on Instagram
AFP reached out to Eisinger who did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the misleading posts.
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