Photo manipulation
Altering a photograph after it is taken, by painting, cutting, airbrushing, or software, so that it shows a person, object, or event that was not there, or hides one that was.
The photograph's claim is "this was in front of the lens," and manipulation keeps the claim while changing the content. In the darkroom era the work was slow and the results often visible under a glass; the device nonetheless rewrote the official history of the Soviet Union, where purged officials were painted out of group portraits until Stalin stood alone. Software removed the labor, and the burden of proof shifted: a picture now has to be shown genuine rather than shown false.
The commercial form, retouching bodies in advertising, is the same device applied to a standard rather than a fact: the viewer is shown a person who does not exist and measured against her. Exploits Anchoring and Illusory Truth Effect.
Historical examples
A 1937 photograph shows Stalin walking beside the Moscow–Volga canal with Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD; after Yezhov's arrest and execution he was painted out, and the published version shows Stalin with water where a man had been. David King's archive collected hundreds of such pairs, in which the people removed had usually also been shot.
King, David. The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997.
The best-known heroic portrait of Lincoln, a full-length figure standing by a table, is his head placed on an engraving of John C. Calhoun's body, a composite made by a Philadelphia printer who had no suitable full-length picture of the president. The substitution was not discovered until the 1950s.
Brugioni, Dino A. Photo Fakery: The History and Techniques of Photographic Deception and Manipulation. Dulles, VA: Brassey's, 1999; Library of Congress, "A Lincoln Composite."
In advertising and commerce
The Advertising Standards Authority banned two L'Oréal advertisements, for Lancôme with Julia Roberts and Maybelline with Christy Turlington, after finding that the retouching of the models' skin was so extensive that the pictures could not show what the products did. The company did not supply the unretouched originals.
Advertising Standards Authority, adjudications A11-152059 and A11-152061, 27 July 2011; Sweney, Mark. "L'Oréal's Julia Roberts and Christy Turlington ad campaigns banned." The Guardian, 27 July 2011.
Find two versions of the same historical photograph, one altered. List the differences and say what each change was meant to make the viewer believe.
In the wild
Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.
A party's group photograph from a conference shows a smooth patch of carpet where a now disgraced minister stood in the version the newspapers printed at the time.
What to notice. The person was removed from inside the frame, not cut from its edge. The picture itself was changed.
A skincare advertisement shows a face in which no pore, line, or shadow is visible, beside the words "visible results in 7 days."
What to notice. The result shown was produced in software, not by the product; the photograph is the claim.
A missile-test photograph shows four launches in which the smoke plumes are identical to the pixel.
What to notice. One plume was copied to make four. The event in the picture did not happen as shown.
Sources
- King, David. The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997. ISBN 978-0805052947
- Brugioni, Dino A. Photo Fakery: The History and Techniques of Photographic Deception and Manipulation. Dulles, VA: Brassey's, 1999. ISBN 978-1574881660
- Farid, Hany. Fake Photos. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019. ISBN 978-0262537490