PHOTO MANIPULATION

DO ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS?
  Digital artifacts have politics, they have a great affect on politics and people. I have taken the case of photo manipulation to show how they affect the politics and opinion of the people.   

PHOTO MANIPULATION

While it’s been said the camera doesn’t lie and there are many who would take issue with that axiom, it’s an unfortunate belief that photographers (or more likely those who handle their pictures) can at least fudge the content of an image. Particularly pictures intended to sell products or ideas. Photography has lost its innocence many years ago.

Photo manipulation is as old as photography itself; contrary to the idea of a photo having inherent verisimilitude. Photo manipulation has been regularly used to deceive or persuade viewers, or for improved story-telling and self-expression. Oftentimes even subtle and discrete changes can have profound impacts on how we interpret or judge a photograph which is why learning when manipulation has occurred is important.
 
As early as the American Civil War, photographs were published as engravings based on more than one negative. Officers, politicians etc have used or may be still using the art of photo manipulation to deceive people. No softwares were used in the early stages of photo manipulation, instead more than one negatives are used in the dark room to develop a manipulated photo.
 
In 1860, this nearly iconic portrait (in the form of a lithograph) of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln is a composite of Lincoln's head and the Southern politician John Calhoun's body

                            
Joseph Stalin made use of photo retouching for propaganda purposes. On May 5, 1920 his predecessor Lenin held a speech for Soviet troops that Leon Trotsky attended. Stalin had Trotsky retouched out of a photograph showing Trotsky in attendance. Nikolai Yezhov, an NKVD leader photographed alongside Stalin in at least one photograph, was edited out of the photograph after his execution in 1940.

A notable case of a controversial photo manipulation was a 1982 National Geographic cover in which editors photographically moved two Egyptian pyramids closer together so that they would fit on a vertical cover. This case triggered a debate about the appropriateness of photo manipulation in journalism; the argument against editing was that the magazine depicted something that did not exist, and presented it as fact. There were several cases since the National Geographic case of questionable photo manipulation, including editing a photo of Cher on the cover of Redbook to change her smile and her dress. Another example occurred in early 2005, when Martha Stewart's release from prison was featured on the cover of Newsweek; her face was placed on a slimmer woman's body to suggest that she had lost weight while in prison
        
  The growing popularity of image manipulation has raised concern as to whether it allows for unrealistic images to be portrayed to the public.Silicon Graphics computers running Barco Creator became available in the late 1980s which, alongside other contemporary packages, were effectively replaced in the market by Adobe Photoshop.



BY

N.HARDEV
CH09B066