From the pope in a puffer to the Princess of Wales and family, baby Hitler to Mussolini on horseback, people have always manipulated photographs, whether for political power, image control – or just for fun …
“Pictures or it didn’t happen.” So runs the immediate social media retort to any claim deemed too extraordinary to be true. Carried within it is an assumption shared across the globe which has held firm almost since the invention of the camera: that the ultimate form of proof is the photograph. The idea is so strongly fixed in the human mind, it has acquired the status of a law of nature, one obvious even to a child: the camera never lies.
Except it does, as the images collected here vividly attest. We may think of AI deepfakes, and their Photoshop predecessors, as thoroughly modern menaces, corrupting a previously innocent, reliable medium, but we would be wrong. It turns out people have been doctoring photos, manipulating and meddling, from the start. “Honest” Abe Lincoln was not only the first sitting president to be photographed, but the first to be the subject of a photo fake.
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