Photo Tampering Throughout History

[AcadieLibre]

A good and interesting article about photo tampering through history. I found it a good read and hope others find it as interesting as me.


http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/re...italtampering/

[Mad Aussie]

Just looking through now. Very interesting. I've seen of these before with eir originals but many are new to me.

Just looked at the 1937 shots of Hitler ... that's a really bad job ... they left the guys sleeve in!

[tomorrowstreasures]

what a neat find! image is everything isn't it? thanks for sharing, AL!

[casil403]

I knew about the Stalin and and Mao Tse Tung images. There was also another 10 years back or so I remember about singer Paula Cole who posed for a magazine (Entertainment Weekly) cover with her arms in the air and they air-brushed her hairy armpits to make them shaved. She wrote a letter to the editior in the next issue asking why they airbrushed them and called them cowards...they claimed they thought they were smudges.

[Marko]

I've seen quite a few of these before and shots like these are really fascinating.

The interesting word here for me is "tampering". It's an interesting word because when does "retouching" become tampering? There is a line but where is it?

[JAS_Photo]

I think it depends whether the photo is intended as art or news. Some of the photos are maliciously altered for instance giving Condoleeza Rice those 'evil' eyes but is that any different then using loaded language to persuade your readership which to my mind is equally bad and a lot more subtle and therefore less questioned by the reading public.

This alteration (Linked below) does not really bother me though as it is a composite of two scenes that occurred within seconds of each other and it does not alter what occurred but makes a bigger impact on the viewer.

http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/re...times1+2+3.jpg

[Marko]

A good example raiven, this is great fodder for a chat over a few beers.

Tampering is a negative word that means to alter in a dishonest way. But because it is done on SO may levels it's really hard to separate what is good tampering versus bad or good retouching versus bad or good alteration versus bad.

Differentiating between news and art is a good place to start imo but isn't tampering tampering?