It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that humanity developed an evidentiary medium that in itself inspired confidence: photography. A camera, it seemed, didn’t interpret its surroundings but registered their physical properties, the way a thermometer or a scale would. This made a photograph fundamentally unlike a painting. It was, according to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., a “mirror with a memory.”
Actually, the photographer’s art was similar to the mortician’s, in that producing a true-to-life object required a lot of unseemly backstage work with chemicals. In “Faking It” (2012), Mia Fineman, a photography curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, explains that early cameras had a hard time capturing landscapes—either the sky was washed out or the ground was hard to see. To compensate, photographers added clouds by hand, or they combined the sky from one negative with the land from another (which might be of a different location). It didn’t stop there: nineteenth-century photographers generally treated their negatives as first drafts, to be corrected, reordered, or overwritten as needed. Only by editing could they escape what the English photographer Henry Peach Robinson called the “tyranny of the lens.”
From our vantage point, such manipulation seems audacious. Mathew Brady, the renowned Civil War photographer, inserted an extra officer into a portrait of William Tecumseh Sherman and his generals. Two haunting Civil War photos of men killed in action were, in fact, the same soldier—the photographer, Alexander Gardner, had lugged the decomposing corpse from one spot to another. Such expedients do not appear to have burdened many consciences. In 1904, the critic Sadakichi Hartmann noted that nearly every professional photographer employed the “trickeries of elimination, generalization, accentuation, or augmentation.” It wasn’t until the twentieth century that what Hartmann called “straight photography” became an ideal to strive for.
Were viewers fooled? Occasionally. In the midst of writing his Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle grew obsessed with photographs of two girls consorting with fairies. The fakes weren’t sophisticated—one of the girls had drawn the fairies, cut them out, and arranged them before the camera with hatpins. But Conan Doyle, undeterred, leaped aboard the express train to Neverland. He published a breathless book in 1922, titled “The Coming of the Fairies,” and another edition, in 1928, that further pushed aside doubts.
A greater concern than teen-agers duping authors was dictators duping citizens. George Orwell underscored the connection between totalitarianism and media manipulation in his novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (1949), in which a one-party state used “elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs.” Such methods were necessary, Orwell believed, because of the unsteady foundation of deception on which authoritarian rule stood. “Nineteen Eighty-Four” described a photograph that, if released unedited, could “blow the Party to atoms.” In reality, though, such smoking-gun evidence was rarely the issue. Darkroom work under dictators like Joseph Stalin was, instead, strikingly petty: smoothing wrinkles in the uniforms (or on the faces) of leaders or editing disfavored officials out of the frame.