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Tampering with photos goes as far back as the 1860’s, although the first ‘fake’ photo is said to be made in 1840 by frenchman Hippolyte Bayard. 

Photo Tampering Throughout History shows a very interesting progression of various uses photo manipulation from the mid 1800’s to today’s media, both commercially and in and newsprint.

Our beloved info-bible, describes photo manipulation as such: “Photo manipulation is the application of image editing techniques to photographs in order to create an illusion or deception (in contrast to mere enhancement or correction), through analog or digital means.”

Digital Photomanipulation drew attention due to an altered photo on the cover of the 1982 National Geographic magazine. The Great Pyramids of Giza had been altered to fit the magazine’s vertical format. Today this is common in front cover editing.

A more controversial incident of photomanipulation was in April 2003 when The Los Angeles Times photojournalist Brian Walski was fired for manipulating a couple of his photographs from the war in Iraq for compositional purposes.

A similar incident happened in 2006 when Adnan Hajj, a Lebanese based freelance photographer, was fired for tampering with a photograph of an Israeli air raid in Beirut by adding more and darker smoke. The photo was withdrawn from the Reuters news agency website when it was known that it had been manipulated.

Also in earlier days, photo retouching has been used: 

Joseph Stalin made use of photo retouching for propaganda purposes. (ca. 1930)

A known iconic portrait of President Abraham Lincoln is a composite of Lincoln’s head and the Southern politician John Calhoun’s body. (ca. 1860)

And voila! more people added to the picture.
General Sherman is seen posing with his Generals. General Francis P. Blair (far right) was later added to the original photograph. (ca. 1865)

Glossy magazines do retouching as a standard these days, and often to the extremes. One of the many examples of taking it too far is the cover of the 2003 January edition of GQ Magazine where actress Kate Winslet had been significantly slimmed down. Kate Winslet herself did not like the excessive retouching. “I don’t look like that and more importantly I don’t desire to look like that. I can tell you that they’ve reduced the size of my legs by about a third”

However retouching of glossy magazines are now so common that we expect nothing lessfor celebrities to be digitally retouched on covers, in spreads and advertisements.

In various tabloids, tampering with photos even goes to the length of being used as means to create scandal or get the viewer’s attention. With today’s software, tampered photos may be difficult to detect to the untrained eye. 

“Seeing is believing” is no longer a sure thing.