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Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop

Fineman, Mia (2012)

This title is in print.

New York Book Show, Merit Award, Special Trade - Photography Category (2013); Amazon list of Books of the Year / Art and Photography (2012)

Description

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 Adobes now-ubiquitous Photoshop software was also part of photography's pre-digital 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 on these pages—abundantly illustrated with works from an international array of public and private collections—are multiple exposure, combination printing, photomontage, composite portraiture, overpainting, hand coloring, and retouching. The resulting images are as diverse in style and motivation as they are in technique. Taking her argument beyond fine art into the realms of politics, journalism, fashion, entertainment, and advertising, Fineman demonstrates that the old adage "the camera does not lie" is one of photography's great fictions.

Table of contents

Director's Foreword
Sponsor's Statement
Acknowledgments
Lenders to the Exhibition
Note to the Reader

Introduction

1. Picture Perfect

2. Artifice in the Name of Art

3. Politics and Persuasion

4. Novelties and Amusements

5. Pictures in Print

6. Mind's Eye

7. Protoshop

Discussion of Individual Works

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Glossary of Technical Terms
Index
Photograph Credits

About the authors

Mia Fineman is Assistant Curator in the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She has been a regular contributor to the New York Times, Slate, the Village Voice, and numerous other publications.

Press reviews

BOMB Magazine

"Mia Fineman's brilliant, exhaustive Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop should become the founding gospel—the Dead Sea Scrolls—in the liberation of photography from the Great Anxiety over Photographic Truth. [...] [an] extraordinary 296 page catalogue for the exhibition she curated at the Metropolitan Museum, Fineman is clear to differentiate between the universal manipulations of all lensed images, which she describes as 'translating the constantly changing, full-color, three-dimensional world into a flat, static, bounded image,' and 'manipulated photography,' in which 'the final image is not identical to what the camera 'saw' in the instant at which the negative was exposed.'"

Boston Globe

"illuminating"

Publishers Weekly

"engrossing ... A talented writer, Met assistant curator Fineman traces photo "fakery" to the dawn of the medium more than 150 years ago when the artists took license for both aesthetic and commercial ends ... Each chapter, as well as the "Discussions of Individual Works," yields pleasures and erudition ... an unequivocal delight"

World of Interiors

"In these days when electronic image sensors and microchips have all but replaced shutters and silver-based film… Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop makes plain, doctoring images has been going on since at least 1841, when a friend of Fox Talbot’s blotted out a superfluous Capuchin friar from his calotype of a scene in Malta. Enter a world of wispy spirits, montaged blue skies, lopped-off Communists and suspiciously rosy-cheeked portraits in this finely written history."

ARTINFO

"A single-author/historian project that reveals the breadth of a subject that's been hiding in plain sight. Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Mia Fineman's book reveals less that photographers were clever tricksters than that the manipulation of photography was important to the early days of the photography market, and that it impacted movements in art (such as surrealism), advertising and more. The pictures are hey look at this! fun, but the text is as good a straight read as anything here, too."

Creative Review

"... as [Fineman's] meticulously researched book shows, [...] photography has proven to be a fluid form of communication ever since its inception in the 19th century. Intriguingly, Fineman looks at how image manipulation has been used to similar ends within very different contexts, from politics and advertising, to fashion and art ..."

Antiques and The Arts Weekly

"The fully illustrated, 296-page catalog written by Mia Fineman is informative and interesting."

CHOICE

"Fineman (Metropolitan Museum of Art) presents a most extensive and articulate survey of the myriad ways that photographers have created manipulated photographs over the past 170-odd years. Illustrated with 276 well reproduced examples of work ranging from the vernacular to the deliberately aesthetic, this well written book has a good bibliography and a glossary of technical terms."

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Exhibition

Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop

October 11, 2012–January 27, 2013

This is the first major exhibition devoted to the history of doctored photographs, from hand-painted daguerreotypes and altered salt prints of the 1840s to the pre-digital dreamscapes of the late twentieth century. While Photoshop and other digital editing programs have brought about an increased awareness of the degree to which photographs can be manipulated, photographers—including such major artists as Gustave Le Gray, Henry Peach Robinson, Edward Steichen, and John Baldessari—have been fabricating, modifying, and otherwise manipulating camera images since the medium was first invented. Featuring some two hundred visually captivating photographs created in the service of art, politics, news, entertainment, and commerce, this international loan exhibition will significantly revise our understanding of photographic history as it traces the medium's complex and changing relationship to visual truth.