Faked Photographs: Look, and Then Look Again

The following article appeared in the Sunday, August 23, 2009 edition of the New York Times:

What a marvel the first photographic images must have been to their early-19th-century viewers — the crisp, unassailable reality of scenes and events, unfiltered by an artist’s paintbrush or point of view.

And what an opportunity for manipulation. It didn’t take long for schemers to discover that with a little skill and imagination, photographic realism could be used to create manufactured realities. “The very nature of photography was to record events,” said Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at Dartmouth College and a detective of photographic fakery. “You’d think there would have been a grace period of respect for this new technology.”

But the tampering began almost immediately: affixing Lincoln's head to another politician’s more regally posed body; re-arranging the grim detritus of Civil War battlefields to be better composed for the camera; erasing political enemies.

Sorting icons of truth from icons of propaganda is often a thorny business that can take decades to resolve, and that’s if it gets resolved. The long-argued case of Robert Capa's shocking “Falling Soldier” of 1936, taken during the Spanish Civil War, has recently flared again. Is this a loyalist soldier in his fatal moment, or is it staged? A Spanish researcher has scrutinized the terrain in the photo’s background and determined that it is not an area near Cerro Muriano, as Capa’s biographer had said, but another spot, about 35 miles away. Whether this forces the conclusion that the scene was acted out is being debated with fresh vigor. (Critics have raised doubts about the photo since the 1970s.)

Questions dogged Joe Rosenthal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning shot of Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima from the start — the result of a conversation overheard and misunderstood, according to Hal Buell, who wrote a book about the image.

Click here to read the rest of the article and to see the slide show "A Brief History of Photo Fakery."