Illusions, Fake News and PhotoShop, oh my?

Taking her argument beyond fine art into the realms of politics, journalism, fashion, entertainment, and advertising, Mia Fineman demonstrates that the old adage “the camera does not lie” is one of photography’s great fictions.

Buy on Amazon - "Faking It:  Manipulated Photography before Photoshop" (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Photographic manipulation is a familiar phenomenon in the digital era. What will come as a revelation to readers of this captivating, wide-ranging book is that nearly every type of manipulation we associate with Adobe’s now-ubiquitous Photoshop software was also part of photography’s predigital repertoire, from slimming waistlines and smoothing away wrinkles to adding people to (or removing them from) pictures, not to mention fabricating events that never took place. Indeed, the desire and determination to modify the camera image are as old as photography itself—only the methods have changed.

By tracing the history of manipulated photography from the earliest days of the medium to the release of Photoshop 1.0 in 1990, Mia Fineman offers a corrective to the dominant narrative of photography’s development, in which champions of photographic “purity,” such as Paul Strand, Edward Weston, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, get all the glory, while devotees of manipulation, including Henry Peach Robinson, Edward Steichen, and John Heartfield, are treated as conspicuous anomalies.

Among the techniques discussed in the pages of "Faking It"... abundantly illustrated with works from an international array of public and private collections—are multiple exposure, combination printing, photomontage, composite portraiture, over-painting, hand coloring, and retouching. The resulting images are as diverse in style and motivation as they are in technique. ~~Amazon review, 2012

###

And while we're on the subject of  illusions--

ATTN: writers, musicians, students: Is someone stealing your work? 

Check now for FREE using a real-time app at GRAMMARLY

Word processor software can't do this one for you. See ya' at the Grammy's!  

Share