Digital Doctoring: can we trust photographs?

We may have the impression that photography can no longer be trusted. From the tabloid magazine to the fashion industry to main-stream media outlets to political campaigns to the photo hoaxes that land in our email in-boxes, doctored photographs are appearing with a growing frequency and sophistication. The truth is, however, that photography lost its innocence many years ago. The nearly iconic portrait of the U.S. President Abraham Lincoln (circa 1860), for example, was a fake, and only the beginning of a long history of photographic trickery. I will briefly explore the history and more modern examples of photographic tampering and discuss recent technological advances that have the potential to return some trust to photographs. Abraham Lincoln and Winged Fairies In the early part of his career, Southern politician John Calhoun was a strong supporter of slavery. It is ironic, therefore, that the nearly iconic portrait of Abraham Lincoln is a composite of Calhoun’s body and Lincoln’s head. It is said that this was done because there was no sufficiently “heroicstyle” portrait of Lincoln available. While the creation of such an image required significant skill and time, it was by no means unique. In the early part of the 1900s Stalin famously had his enemies airbrushed out of photographs. Between 1917 and 1920 two young girls in Cottingley, Yorkshire create