Obama Mystery Theater: His Ever-Morphing Face (updated)

1979, graduation from Punahou High in Hawaii:Wide, open-lipped smile.  Good teeth. Slim lips. Below is another from the very same day:

Below, at Occidental, circa 1980:  Smiles with his lips closed, sometimes.  A wide nose and a slimmer nose.  Slim lips and fuller lips.

Curious.

 

He looks younger than he did at his high school graduation.  Effect of marijuana? Below, during his first trip to Africa, after his father’s death, 1982/3:Smiles with his lips closed.  Again, he looks younger than he did at high school graduation.  Below is supposed to be the same trip. 

This is the infamous pasted-on head photo with Granny Sarah: 

 How can he look so much older than he did in the photo above, when it’s supposed to be the same trip?  Note the clothing.

Below, at Columbia, circa 1982, so around the same time as the two photos above: 

Here he keeps his lips closed, and has a narrow nose.  Below is supposed to be in NYC, the same timeframe.  Smiling wide with straight teeth and there’s that wider nose again.

1987 (allegedly):My how Granny has aged.  Smiling with those tightly closed lips again. Downturned nose.  A dimple? 

Updated 11/29/11: Now below is another (h/t tdr) supposedly from that same visit to Kenya, circa 1987. Barry with half-brothers Samson Nyandega (aka Abo) on left and Bernard on right:

Compare his face to the face in the man in the previous photo. Same person? Same summer?  Is it likely? (Who was cropped out on the far left?  David?)

Update 11/30/2011: by request, for Kathy, the full image:

Some of the same individuals, wearing the same clothing, from a 2007 Sun Times article that gave no date for the photo:

Front row: Auma Rita (Kezia’s daughter), Kezia, Sarah, unknown; back row: Said (son of Sarah), Barry, Malik, probably Malik’s American wife, Samson (Abo), Bernard.  Wikipedia identifies woman on far right in front row as Zeituni, but it’s not Zeituni. It may be Auma Marie, Obama’s first cousin.  More photos here for comparison.

In 1991:Open lips, looks older.  This comes from a recently released video that is supposed to be from 1991–Obama at the Harvard Law Review, speaking for Black History Month on TBS.  Below, the same timeframe, while at Harvard Law, circa 1991:

Directly above is from a newspaper story that was PUBLISHED when he was at Harvard.  There are those straight teeth and the wide nose, again.

His wedding, Oct. 1992:

Straight teeth, not such a wide nose.  Now it gets interesting.  From 1995, after the release of his book, Dreams From My Father:Isn’t that curious?  Now he looks younger than he did in the 1991 video.  His teeth are anything but straight and even, and he’s got a widow’s peak. His nose is wider than at his wedding. Below, 1996, according to Ulsterman:

  

Back to smiling with closed lips.  Look at that odd hairline and wide, downturned nose. He looks more like that person in the 1987 photo with Granny Sarah.  Did he get a “Marcel“?

May 1998:

This post came about because of the recently released 1991 video that looks like one of those videos of talking babies, where a moving mouth is cloned onto the baby’s face.  Click the image below for a larger side-by-side comparison. 

If the 1991 video (the image on the right) is legitimate, how can it be that four years later (the image on the left), he looks younger, his teeth are uneven, and his hairline is different?

We have another post of Obama “mug shots”.  What are we dealing with here?  Obviously, even to an amateur, some of these photos and videos have been modified.  Is it because we’re dealing with a vain person who once had bad teeth and so made sure that his smile was “corrected” on all early photos? 

What’s the solution to this mystery?

Update 12/06/11:  Hayden, one of our new commenters, provided these photos; click to enlarge:

Hayden explains:

The mysterious disappearing wedding ring. Compare Obama’s left hand in the two pictures outside the photoshop… Figure 1: Cropped image of Obama’s left hand from the large group picture taken outside of the photoshop. Figure 2: same image as Figure 1 with increased Contrast, from normal to +30% Figure 3: same image as Figure 1 with decreased contrast. I actually had to bring the contrast down from Normal to -20% and Brightness down to -20% to more closely match the coloring of figure 1 to the figure 4. Figure 4: cropped image of Obama’s left hand taken from the smaller picture of only the 3 guys taken outside the photoshop. Notice the shadow under Obama’s hand is darker in this image and he looks to be wearing a gold ring on his left ring finger! Figure 5: The same image as figure 4 with increased contrast to +30% Figures 1 and 4 side by side – supposedly the same picture but he has a ring on in one and not the other. Additional notes: It looks like Obama was/is holding a cigarette in his right hand which was cut off. The area between Obama’s right side and the guy next to him blurs abnormally. The black line in the background running down the window of the photoshop should go directly into and behind the man in the blue t-shirt’s arm. Instead, a blurry line forms where it meets his arm, as well as in the area where it meets Obama’s jacket. everything else in the background is clear with relatively crisp lines. The blurring is inconsistent with the rest of the photo.

Please refer to the complete source images in the post, above.  I agree that it does appear as if he had a ring on and then it was “blurred” out of the image.  If you look closely at the photo where he’s sitting next to Granny in Kenya, and her hand is up near his face, you’ll see that he appears to wear a wedding ring in that photo, too. It’s blurry, though. 

As for the right hand in the brothers group photo, it almost looks as if he has that finger in a splint or bandage. Or as if they removed a gloved hand and replaced it with Barry’s hand, and forgot to smudge out a few of the white-gloved fingers. Maybe Michael Jackson was there?

Update 12/19/11:  Because of a recent article by Martha Trowbridge, it behooves us to place an excerpt here that shows the pertinent part of the 1990 article that was shown earlier, above:

This is no huge revelation. We’ve discussed this anomaly for several years now. Do note that Obama himself had not “uttered” the words. The reporter wrote it, without attribution. It is interesting that this “mistake” was made in 1990, though. It’s arguable, certainly, that the AP interviewer got the information from somewhere. But where? The reporter doesn’t say. It’s mere inference to assume that Barry uttered these words. Harvard Law might have provided a “biography” on background. The mistake may have been made there. His parents did divorce when he was 2 (if you accept his fab bio). He subsequently moved to Indonesia. Somebody else may have mixed up the facts.  It would also behoove people to acknowledge sources.