They look HDR'd to me which is all the rage these days. I too thought the article interesting though. Although the narrative of Captain America is that he enlisted in the 40's so chances of him having a turban and a beard are really really low, but it the dissonance effect is one that can be used to great advantage by artists to surface presumptions we don't know we are holding.

Yes, though I want badly for them to be true, the photos do look to me at the very least manipulated and at worst very poorly composited. I haven't looked too closely at any of the images, and I don't even have my glasses on :) But my initial sense is that the powerful frontal speculars and weird foot contact in the first photo look totally bogus (beyond strong lens-axis flash bogus due to the feet); As he walks up the stairs from the subway, the illumination on his legs is the opposite of the lambertian falloff you might expect (furthermore, how can the sides of the stairwell illuminate his legs?), and the frontal diffuse light on him and speculars on the shield don't fit with the illumination of the railings to me; on Puerto Rico day, you would expect the strong speculars on his shield to register similarly on the glasses and jewelry of the woman next to him (and also, the diffuse light on both appears to be falling from slightly different directions); Jumping out of FDNY truck, illumination again seems reversed, and though the left-hand door has a shadow, he doesn't; Meditating in the park, possibly just really strong strobe. Maybe there's just some really janky flash work combined with over-zealous post-processing going on here, but I feel that most of them can't be real. Well, he does at least pop out in every shot!

That said, I'm not sure I care if the images are bogus. Faking the imagery would be a kind of metatheater that could somehow seem appropriate here. At the very least, we're all going to be scrutinizing the image of a turbaned Captain America, and debating the authenticity of the image, feeling that on some level, whatever the ostensible manipulations, the image is in fact real, and hoping that others will perceive it as such.

The photos look unrealistic because the photographer used flash. They used something to diffuse the light, which makes it harder to recognize as flash, but the color temperature gives it away.

The second one looked artificial to me; the other two look realistic.

Honestly, my main dissonance is that he's so skinny.

It's the fault of the HN submitter. If you look at the title on the article, it's fine.

It's a little more low-tech:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_%28photography%29