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|| SportsShooter.com: News Item: Posted 2005-05-03
Off Base: The more things change, the more they stay the same
Phony photographs have been around for a long time
By Matt Mendelsohn
Photo by Matt Mendelsohn
Matt Mendelsohn, shown here in a self-portrait, still shoots film.
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Angelina and Brad!! Vile Iraqi torture photos!! Derek Jeter and Johnny Damon!! The kiss at the Hotel de Ville!!! With the number of times the word "fake" has come up in the photography world of late you would think we were in the business of selling phony Gucci purses outside Madison Square Garden. Only weeks after the now infamous Newsweek cover featuring an ebullient Martha Stewart--er, head of Martha Stewart--comes more news of phony photographs. Let's take a look around:
Last week in England court martial proceedings began (and then were abruptly halted) in the case against Private Stuart MacKenzie, of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment, accused of creating bogus photographs of British soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners. The most graphic of these forgeries was an image that purported to show a soldier urinating on a hooded and bound prisoner. The photos ran in the Daily Mirror last year under the headline "Vile." The editor of that paper was fired.
In Paris this week, an unidentified Swiss collector paid a whopping $200,000 for an original print of Robert Doisneau's legendary "Kiss By the Hotel De Ville." The print had belonged to Francoise Bornet, a former actress, who had to take Doisneau to court to get him to admit that the iconic image, a staple of college dorm rooms around the world, was actually set up. That lawsuit, during the early 90's, had an entire generation of photographers (myself included) saying "Say it ain't so, Doisneau." Needless to say, a little less romance and spontaneity didn't seem to hurt sales any.
Back on American soil, the news was all Brad and Angela. In order to keep up with the Jones--the Jones here being US Weekly and its "smoking gun" photo of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt walking along an African beach--Star magazine decided that it need to come up with a fantastic photo of its own. Unfortunately it required a bit of island hopping. The cover photo of the Star features a photo of Pitt and Jolie, albeit one that is created from two separate images. The image of Jolie was taken in Virginia a year ago; the Pitt photo taken in Aguilla in January. Star readers are told on page 8 that the image is a "composite of two images." Well, la di da.
One could argue that at least the Star is being honest...sort of. Newsweek never had the guts to use the word composite. I mean they're the Star, right? Get rid of the People magazine look-alike fonts and the glossy, more traditional size (I preferred the newsprint of old, personally) and you're only a few steps removed from its distant cousin, the Weekly World News, with its stable of Bat Boy, Big Foot et al. Though you had to go to page 8 to find it, the words are there: "composite of two images."
Sports Illustrated has been making its readers work harder for their $3.99. The April 4, 2005 baseball preview issue featured arch-rivals Johnny Damon and Derek Jeter glaring at each other. But how many SI readers were able to make heads or tails of the cryptic photo credit that read "photographs by Walter Iooss, Jr.?" Photographs. Plural. Hmmm. In similar fashion the April 25 SI cover features Amare Stoudemire and Shaquille O'Neal posing together. Standing together, that is, until you see the dual photo credit. Thankfully, this time there is no pretend "interaction." But the fact remains the same: the cover appears to be a photo of two individuals standing next to each other. Now before we feign shock and awe let's acknowledge that this is not an entirely uncommon practice. A magazine's cover is what sells the rest of the magazine on a newsstand and not surprisingly, art directors have long been keen on creating the most alluring cover possible. And let's face it, it's hard to convince top athletes and Hollywood royalty to adjust their schedules for photo shoots. So is shooting them in separate cities and sewing the photos together really that bad?
Well, it is if you're on the photography end of things. Though many of these ideas begin with the art department they all seem to end with up in the laps of the photography department. I don't hear anyone bemoaning the loss of credibility among design directors around the country. Ha! You never hear the public railing against those sneaky, pesky layout editors, do you? Of course not. Did you ever think how easy it would be to be an Adobe Illustrator user rather than a Photoshop user?
The past few years have been a bull market for faked photos. Brian Walski's now infamous image out of Iraq, John Kerry's "close" encounter with Jane Fonda at an anti-war rally, tourists atop the World Trade Center as a doomed plane approaches, and, most recently, the Newsweek debacle would all seem to underscore the perils of life in a digital world. And while today's readers might need to put on their Sherlock Holmes caps in order to decipher photos and photo credits, few may know that it was Holmes' creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, who was at the center of the first, great fake photo debate. Long before Photoshop there were the Cottingley Fairies.
In 1917 two young girls from the English countryside created a worldwide firestorm with their dreamy images of prancing fairies. The photographs, captured on a Midg plate camera, were sufficiently entrancing that Conan Doyle, a devout proponent of Spiritualism, took up their case. In the Christmas 1920 issue of Strand Magazine he published a report on the fairies and their mortal companions, cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths. The rest, as they say, is history. The photographs were scrutinized the world over and the two cousins became celebrities. Scholars weighed in, Harry Houdini weighed in, officials from Kodak expressed scepticism and, not unlike visions of the Virgin Mary in grilled cheese, people used the images to validate their own religious and supernatural beliefs. The photos, silly and obviously contrived by today's standards, were no laughing matter back in the 20's.
A few years after Conan Doyle published his fairy treatise (and apparently convinced his friends that he had lost some of his marbles) the braintrust behind the Russian Revolution was just getting started in revving up what would arguably become the most organized operation of photo forgery in history. In his fascinating book, "The Commisar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art In Stalin's Russia," David King presents decades worth of doctored photographs that were meant to deceive the world. Some terrifying, some downright comical in their execution, the collection illustrates just how vast the conspiracy was to shape the "news" coming out of Russia. In one case the same photograph of Stalin and (insert murdered crony here) appears over the years in four different incarnations. A few years back the Newseum, a museum of journalism here in the nation's capital, had an exhibition of some of the photos from King's collection. Anyone who has ever used the magic wand tool in Photoshop would agree that these old school photo forgeries are as impressive as they are sinister.
Ken Light, the photographer who took that original John Kerry image in 1971 (sans Jane Fonda), said in an article published on The Digital Journalist, "It's not that photographic imagery was ever unquestionable in its veracity; as long as pictures have been made from photographic film, people have known how to alter images by cropping. But what I've been trying to teach my students about, how easy and professional-looking these distortions of truth have become in the age of Photoshop -- and how harmful the results can be -- had never hit me so personally as the day I found out somebody had pulled my Kerry picture off my agency's Web site, stuck Fonda at his side, and then used the massive, unedited reach of the Internet to distribute it all over the world.
He's absolutely right. Unfortunately it's clear that photo deception is like everything else in life: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Additional links:
The Commisar Vanishes:
http://www.newseum.org/berlinwall/commissar_vanishes
Cottingley Fairies:
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/doyle.htm
http://www.cottingley.net/fairies.shtml
Matt Mendelsohn was a contract photographer for USA TODAY during the 1990's. He was the news photo editor for that paper and became Director of Photography of USA Weekend. He started his career in the 1980's at UPI. He still shoots film.
Related Links:
Matt Mendelsohn
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