Is It True That Photographs Have Always Been Manipulated?

William Mortensen, Human Relations, bromoil transfer print through textured screen. Allegedly inspired because he was angry about a long distance phone bill.

I don't mean to stir up a bitter old argument, but I thought I'd address one little question*.

Whenever I or anyone says "digital images are easy to manipulate," people will inevitably chime in and claim that photos could always be manipulated and that it's not just digital images.

No disrespect to anyone who did so, but...well...

Sigh.

It's true, strictly speaking (they're not wrong). But it's also deeply misleading. I spent many years printing for a living, and a print from a negative, much less a slide, is very difficult to substantively modify. And doing so—even successfully—almost always leaves telltale signs that the manipulation was done. Maybe these telltales are not obvious to a layperson, but often they can be detected by an expert. So...

...Yes, the Soviets used to "disappear" luckless officials and expunge them from old pictures, as documented in David King's The Commissar Vanishes (a good book by the way). But the CIA and MI6 could pore over the pictures and sometimes (no one could claim "always"!) detect when changes had been made.

...Yes, objects could be "airbrushed out" of a print, such as the unfortunate "fencepost growing out of the subject's head" in the famous Kent State image. But airbrushing was difficult to accomplish and almost always had to be done by a skilled expert. It wasn't available to everyone by any stretch, and it cost money.

...Yes, Ansel Adams retouched an image of a high school graduation year spelled out in white painted stones on a shadowed hillside in one of his landscapes. Negative-to-positive prints were routinely "spotted." If a negative had dust on it when it was printed, the mote of dust or dirt, printed as a negative image, would create a tiny white spot on the print; sometimes there were dozens or hundreds of these (it only seemed like thousands). Photographers routinely "knocked down" this white spot to make it invisible by dabbing it with a dye called SpoTone** using a tiny pointed brush. Spotting, like darkroom work, was a chore enjoyed only by a small minority of those who had to do it. One of my advanced expert Contributing Editors at Darkroom Techniques magazine was initially excited by digital imaging because it meant that spotting would become so much easier! He said if he never had to spot a print again he would thank his lucky stars. Anyway, from there, it was a short leap to realizing that unwanted small light objects in prints could be similarly disguised. But this was pretty limited. It didn't work with anything that was too large, at least if you didn't have mad skills like the Master.

...Yes, similarly, many photographic techniques had various controls by which to correct images to make them look like they were "supposed" to look (burning and dodging and contrast adjustments being the usual examples trotted out), and these controls could be extended or overdone to change the visual effect of an picture.

...Yes, you could retouch wrinkles and blemishes by "drawing" in pencil on the back of a large-format portrait image—Edward Weston complained bitterly about having to spend long, boring hours at this thankless task for his commercial portrait clients (he was an artist. Except he really was). Some sheet films were specifically made with a "retouching surface," meaning a matte surface with some "tooth" that was easier to draw on than a glossy surface. But if you went too far with this, it could make for an odd-looking image which even an untrained eye could "sense" if not actually "see."

George Hurrell asked movie stars to arrive at his studio wearing no makeup, and Joan Crawford said she came for this portrait with only a "scrubbed face." Hurrell's master retouchers then spent many hours making the finished portrait on the left from the straight shot on the right. But this was high-level work in 1931, available to very few photographers and very expensive even for the pros who had access to it. Moreover, would any professional photographer (now or then!) look at the result on the left and not know it has been retouched?

...Yes, many Pictorialist photographers reworked photographic images so extensively that they were essentially half photograph, half traditional visual artwork (cf. "Struggle" by Robert Demachy). The Pictorialists had many camera-club heirs in later decades, the reductio ad absurdum of whom is that notorious paragon of kitsch William Mortensen, whose work is so bad it's almost, well, good. There was eventually a reaction against the practice of striving to make photographs mimic traditional paintings and drawings, a goal which has never been seriously or widely revived.

...Yes, Henry Peach Robinson and O.E. Reijlander were featured in Newhall's once-standard history (first printed 1937 and revised several times—I prefer the fifth edition) as examples of combination printing, meaning making one image from two more more negatives. A. Aubrey Bodine had favorite dramatic skies that he would drop into different pictures, and Jerry Uelsmann, a master of the technique, used it to create surrealistic dream images—which, however, were not intended to deceive. Another type of combination printing were those spoof postcards of people with giant vegetables and so forth so beloved of the 19th century—you can still find these occasionally at antique-slash-junk shops if you look for them. But those were jokes and also not intended to deceive.

But no, I don't think Matt Mahurin's 1994 alteration of O.J. Simpson's mugshot on the cover of TIME magazine is an example of pre-digital manipulation. Photoshop was introduced in 1987 and even I had access to it by 1994, at least though my company's Graphic Design department. I can't find a source, at least not off the cuff, but I'm guessing it's likely that Matt created his unfortunate and ill-fated "illustration" (you can read his own thoughts about it here) using digital means.

O.J.'s mugshot and Matt Mahurin's TIME magazine cover. Of course the values (lightness and darkness) you're seeing now, here, aren't absolute.

So yes, it's certainly true that photographs were manipulated before digital came along. But most such methods a.) required skill and practice and/or specialized equipment to put into effect (i.e., to airbrush, you needed an airbrush and the practiced skill to use it); b.) cost money; c.) were severely limited in their availability to average and casual snapshooters, if only because few would take the pains or go to all the effort; and d.) very often left telltales of the manipulation in the resulting image such that an expert could at least guess that something might be fishy. It required great skill to make substantive alterations invisibly, and even then, you'd be limited as to the extent of the alterations you could pull off. Digital images, early on, became, by orders of magnitude, a.) easier to alter and to a much greater extent if desired; b.) and more cheaply; and c.) far more invisibly, very often leaving absolutely no visible trace in the image that any changes had been made. Even to the eyes of experts. And of course the means of making such changes were far more widely available, to many, many more people. So to claim that there is equivalence or parity in the ways digital and pre-digital photographs can be faked is, as I said, deeply misleading. Of course, it's something Internet believes, and what Internet believes is indelible. That can never be altered! 

Part of a broader fight
Finally, I need to point out that the assertion that "photographs have always been manipulated" was, originally, during the earlier years of the digital transition, essentially an argumentative claim in defense of digital. There was a period when film users were defending film as being superior, and, at first, they had the weight of long history and prestige on their side. Initially they were pretty smug about it, even insufferable at times, and adopters of the upstart medium were correspondingly touchy about defending it from attack. This was only true for a short period of time, maybe a decade or a decade and a half depending on how you look at it. (It would be interesting to run down the specifics of the various stages by which advances in digital imaging overwhelmed all of the supposed advantages of film.) But, during that time, it was largely a status argument, not a technical one—so neither side were particularly inclined to take an objective look at the relative ease and extent of how various kinds of photographs could be manipulated.

Mike
Image sources, from top down: Minneapolis Institute of Art; Mark A. Vieira via The Hollywood Reporter; Comitialbulb561; WorthPoint.

*Again.

**As far as I could find out, the owner of SpoTone had a heart attack around the year 2000 and the company was shuttered. (One wag wickedly opined, "If I owned Spotone I probably would have had a heart attack too when I saw what could be done with the rubber stamp and healing tools in Photoshop.") Alternatives remain available.

P.S. I will say that one reason I like demotic film snapshots—I have many books—is that they were almost never manipulated. They just "came out," as people used to say. ("Did it come out?" "I took a picture of her, but it didn't come out.") That was for a time true of smartphone snaps too. It wasn't that phone snaps couldn't be manipulated, it was merely that they seldom were, because so few people could or would go to the trouble. That period is over now too, if the manipulations are going to be built into the phones and applied automatically.

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Kirk Decker: "Dust spotting with SpoTone wasn’t too bad if it was just a few spots, but if you dropped a wet roll of film on a dusty floor or got a scratch running the length of the neg, you were screwed. It seemed universal for small town Mom and Pop studios that Pop was the photographer and Mom was the print artist. Retouching on color photos required a base lacquer coat with tooth for Mom’s colored pencils and then another coat of lacquer to seal the work she’d done. Pop would spray one set of prints while Mom worked on another set. Most of them didn’t have spray booths and if you were looking to buy a studio you wouldn’t have to look very long to find one for sale because Pop had died from lung cancer. You don’t see that very often with Photoshop. It’s my understanding that our current concept of ghosts as floaty diaphanous beings is a direct result of early spiritual photography manipulations."

Geoff Wittig: "Thoughtful post, Mike. Years back when I was just getting started with Photoshop and digital printing, my nephew's family asked me to remove his ex-girlfriend from a family group photo, as she was now persona non grata. I happily accepted the technical challenge and was quite pleased with the result. I didn't think at all about any potential ethical issues. More recently a niece asked me to remove her toxic and abusive ex-husband from a photo. Having met the gentleman in question, it was very satisfying to erase him from the photograph, if not from memory."

Jayanand Govindaraj: "The problem really seems to be that the ability to manipulate images has become democratic—what was a finely-honed skill has become a blunt instrument. That is absolutely fine in my book—if one person could do it, then everyone is entitled to do it, and that is the way humanity progresses in all spheres, as closely guarded technology becomes widely used. Besides, there were different ways to alter reality with subtlety, in the darkroom—ever see the examples on Magnum's Darkroom Prints series? The levels of adjustments is mind boggling—the amount of post-processing done by most photographers today would never approach anywhere near the amount shown there."

Jeff Hartge: "I would agree that today, every photograph is suspect regardless of source. However, I strongly believe there is a higher percentage of past photographs that are fake than is currently realized. My stance is that past photographs involving 'high stakes' of some form should be assumed to be manipulated. Corporate and government entities were completely capable of quickly and efficiently producing fake images that could deceive experts. Especially 35mm Tri-X images! The poor quality of certain Soviet images should not be taken as representative of the state of the art in photo fakery. The Soviet Union had much more pressing problems than being concerned that every fake image they produced could fool Western analysts. Most of their faked images were simply for internal consumption. I would argue that there are some images that were produced by the Soviets that fooled, and continue to fool, experts. I would also argue that the higher value BW 'art' images would also be suspect. Jerry Uelsmann's techniques were, on some levels, harder than just creating the same images using photorealistic drawing techniques! Of course having been bombarded with 'reality TV' (among other things), I now start with the assumption that every photograph ever taken was 'staged.' When and image does pass muster on 'staging' it is suspected of being taken out of context. The caption under every photo is always a lie in my mind."

John Shriver: "My great aunt Rose Meirowitz married Harry Grogin. He was assistant art director at the New York Evening Graphic, and made many fake composite photographs under the moniker 'composograph.' They would fake photos that they couldn't really take, like Rudolph Valentino's ascent into heaven. A famous composograph had to do with Kip Rhinelander's divorce trial, where the cause was this his wife hid that she was part black. She was forced to remove her top in the courtroom, and the photographers were excluded. So Grogin staged a fake courtroom, and hired a showgirl to pose as the wife."

Stan B.: "Before, one could question a photograph's veracity should the suspicion arise; now, it should always be questioned—as a matter of course."

John Sparks: "In 1980, I worked for an architectural photographer; mostly as a darkroom printer. During the time I worked there, one of his most reprinted photographs was of a brick school building where students had cleaned chalkboard erasers on the bricks in one area that was about an inch square on an 8x10 print. There were probably a hundred eraser marks. We would regularly get orders for 20 or 40 8x10 prints and occasional orders for large prints like 24x30. We would regularly spend a week or more at a time spotting those prints. I got quite good at spotting. In a stack of 20 prints, there would be some that you couldn't tell that anything had been done unless you used a magnifying glass, but with enough magnification, you could always tell. The large prints were both easier and harder. Easier because the spots you were trying to hit were larger, but harder because everything was bigger and easier to see, but if you built the tone up slowly with dilute dyes the eraser marks really did disappear. I think we could have made a large print with very careful retouching, then made a copy negative to print from that would have made it almost impossible to detect the retouching on the prints. I think we talked about doing this, but it was about the time the orders from this negative dried up. In any event, retouching prints took a lot of skill and a lot of time."

Comments

[louis mccullagh]

https://store.magnumphotos.com/products/darkroom-prints-muhammad-ali-chicago-1966

Picture worth a 1000 words.

[darlene]

Having worked as a graphic artist for large print houses and ad agencies in the late 70s and 80s, I can confidently say that all photography destined for commercial print—whether for books, newspapers, magazines, or other media—was retouched, manipulated, or recreated in some way. If the art department missed an issue, it was sent back because the 'instructions to the artist' were not followed correctly.

Before the work goes to print, it gets turned into camera-ready art in the art room by graphic artists and illustrators. Camera-ready art was essential for producing printing plates, and graphic artists worked closely with printers and art directors to ensure the highest quality product. Clients both expected and were charged 'art fees' for this process.

Every photography coffee-table type book has been manipulated. The best print houses charge a lot of money for their services because they are 'artists' or excellent art manipulators (using the term in this context only because of the post title, otherwise they are commercial artists doing their job).

Many photographers today appreciate the unique aesthetic that alternative processes offer, which is a form of manipulation. When I look at historical photos, I see plenty of manipulation—it has been part of photography’s tradition since its inception.

I believe that most, if not all, famous photographs have been manipulated in some way as they passed through various hands in the creative process. This relates directly to what Ansel Adams said:

"The negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score, and the print the performance."

Adams’ photographs were highly manipulated, and that manipulation was central to the creation of his iconic images which speaks directly to the artistry involved in photography.

Adams was able to bring out the full emotional and visual impact of his scenes through manipulation. His approach was not simply about documenting reality; it was about interpreting and shaping it to match his artistic vision. This manipulation allowed him to create images that were not only technically excellent but also emotionally powerful, contributing to his lasting legacy in the world of photography.

One of my favorite photographers from history who was an incredible artist (manipulator) with the tools of the day is, Leonard Misonne (1870-1943).

Without artistic vision, a camera is a copy machine. That is not why I became a photographer.

A favorite manipulated photo that I have a copy of:

[SUMANTA MUKHERJEE]

Art has no interest in photocopying fact/data/truth per se.

Or else, stop considering Photography as an art medium.
A B/W photograph itself is a manipulation of a colour world.
Any image with border (applied by the light tight box and the lens is also a manipulation from the perspective of a person next to the camera.

Manipulation is not the problem or expectation, the intent of doing so and the impact on the pre-conceived perception of the viewer is the point of concern. We need to know the intention and check our perception, both to be considered together.

[Wolfgang Lonien]

> "the manipulations are going to be built into the phones and applied automatically."

- then why do you buy an iPhone16 (Pro I guess?). I would have opted for a 14pro instead (the 15pro will also get what they like to call "Intelligence")...

[Zyni]

Exactly so. This is like saying that, well, humans have been able to go to space for a very long time. And of course it is true: people did indeed go to space using giant rockets. People went even to The Moon this way, and robots went much further. These were heroically expensive, requiring the resources of a nation-state and, later, of the plutocrats. They often did not explode. But it was not until the discovery – by materials scientists, not rocket scientists – of materials suitable for the construction of space elevators that humans went to space: no ordinary family, in 2024, was booking an orbital vacation, but today, almost anyone can afford one.

[Woz]

I wonder what the percentage of manipulated images was then and now...if we're taking a trillion a year, I wouldn't be surprised if the percentage was similar.
Of course, this all changes once phones start automatically manipulating without intervention.

[Christer Almqvist]

Dorothy Wilding (Society Portraits exhibition at the NPG in London September 1991 with a book published by Schirmer-Mosel the same year) used to make very large prints, longest side four feet or so, retouched the large prints (page 39 of the book) and then photographed the retouched prints and used the new negatives for final prints.

Ten minutes walk from where I live, a local photographer used another method 25 years ago, well not he himself, he had a few girls retouch his Hasselblad negatives with very, very fine brushes. None of the girls stayed very long.

[Alan]

"No disrespect to anyone who did so, but...well...

Sigh.

It's true, strictly speaking (they're not wrong). But it's also deeply misleading."

Deep sigh...

I've been visiting this blog just about every day for years but in recent times it's been mostly out of habit and now, today, after reading this drivel I've had enough. It just doesn't seem to be a photography blog any more and when it is it often seems... well, lets just say not to my taste.

I've had enough. Over and out.

[Craig Stocks]

To me, the focus on availability of image manipulation misses the point. It’s like blaming the invention of the typewriter for the growth of propaganda since it made it easier to write false narratives. Instead, the focus should be on the trustworthiness of the source. It seems these days we have an epidemic of misinformation that people are too willing to believe. I don’t trust a photo or news report just because I see it, but I will feel more trust if it’s from a trusted source,

[Terry Burnes]

I have a photograph of my mother on the wall above my desk here. As best I can tell it is a colorized print and in the process of colorizing it the image was clearly enhanced, much like the Joan Crawford photo Mike featured. I love it. She looks beautiful and perfect, not unlike Joan. The photo is well posed and composed, the colors are muted and the print has a softness about it.

I wish I knew more about it, when, where and how it was made. Based on her appearance I suspect it was made during the war, in the early to mid-1940s, probably in San Diego where she had her own modest photography business at the time, while also working at Convair Aircraft. I suspect she had some connection with someone who could do this work. Far and away the best photograph I have of her.

[Sal Santamaura]

"...Some sheet films were specifically made with a "retouching surface," meaning a matte surface with some "tooth" that was easier to draw on than a glossy surface...

Today, there's still one sheet film that includes the retouching surface: KODAK PROFESSIONAL TRI-X 320. I doubt anyone still uses it for its intended purpose, but it's worth its weight in gold. The polyester base side of other sheet films causes troublesome Newton's rings when contact printing and/or enlarging, unless an anti-Newton glass is used to maintain pressure. Those rings are eliminated by the retouching coating's dull surface.

Even more useful, with films that have emulsion surfaces as shiny as those of uncoated polyester bases, e.g. TMAX 100, ACROS II and a number of color negative films, KODAK PROFESSIONAL TRI-X 320 sheets can be cleared by fixing and washing, then used as a spacer between those glossy-emulsion films and the lower plain glass in an enlarger. Voilà: no rings and none of the mess associated with powder sprays used for such suppression.

[dillan]

My mother and my aunt (her sister) were both skilled "touch-up artists," who worked for the same local photographer in the early 1980s.They would make their corrections on the colour print with hand-mixed colour matched paint. My mother was particularly good at it. It is ironic, because I inherited my colour-blindness from her.

Thank you for the very interesting article!

[Wait a sec--SHE wasn't colorblind, was she? I don't see how a colorblind person could be a color retoucher. --Mike]

[Stephanie Luke]

Well, now I'm feeling quite confused and somewhat defensive. Are the "best" photographs only those that show things as they "really are?" Because I never personally lived in a world that consisted of the colors black, white and gray. For a lot of years that was the only way the world could be recorded by a camera device.
Was the development (!) of color photography spurred by the pure desire to finally be able to portray "reality?" At last photographers could get serious!
My point is that for me, capturing a scene or a character is just the beginning. The joy is creating something I want to look at over and over again. It's rarely "perfect" enough SOOC (in my own opinionated vision) and I enjoy immensely trying to make it into something that existed mostly in my head in the first place. I am aware that not everybody, or even a majority of people approach photography that way, and that's fine and dandy.
But I sort of feel like I'm doing it "wrong" from some people's point of view. And that is when the second-guessing raises its ugly head.
(by the way, I love doing monotone stuff, too.)

Stephanie

[nigel]

I am not to sure I agree with you on this.

What you re basically saying is that retouching and manipulating pictures was fine in the analogue era, because it was difficult and time consuming.

But on the other hand the democratisation of photographic retouching thanks to digital and photoshop is not OK, because it is cheap and easy.

It is interesting that several Natural history photography competition winners as well as an infamous gallery show by a famous travel photographer, have been outed as fakes by good eyes.

Personally I like Capture One, it mimics very closely the dodging and burning tools I used in the darkroom. Not much has changed for me during the transition from film to digital.

[John]

All photographs are manipulations of time, light, perspective, POV, tonality, hue, and cry...

[Frank Gorga]

Yes. Photographs have been manipulated in many ways since the very early days of the technology.

Yes again. Digital technology makes the manipulation of photographs quicker and easier. AI makes such manipulation even quicker and easier.

Manipulation is not the issue in my way of thinking. Rather it is the dishonesty of presenting (insisting that?) manipulated photographs somehow represent reality.

Replacing a bland sky with an interesting one in Photoshop and not disclosing this upfront is exactly the same ethically as air brushing out an out-of-favor Soviet politician in my book. There is an intent to deceive in both cases.

Furthermore, AI generated images cannot be photographs as photographs are made by photons impinging on a photo-sensitive surface. To call an AI generated image a photograph is fraud, pure and simple.

As to the issue of how much manipulation is 'allowed'. The answer is clearly 'it depends'. For photojournalism, 'zero' is the proper answer. For fine art, anything goes. Lots of gray area in between but the intent to deceive is the critical issue.

[David Cope]

Well reasoned article Mike. I find it a bit ironic how much effort some put into making easy to manipulate digital photos look like it was shot on hard to manipulate film!