Faking It, by Mia Fineman, is the first book to examine the alteration of photographs from an artistic, rather than a purely technical, perspective. As Fineman writes in her introduction: “This book traces the history of manipulated photography from the 1840s through the early 1990s, when computer software replaced manual techniques as the dominant means of altering photographs. It is a story that has never been told in its entirety,” and this survey is a fascinating rebuttal of the old saying ‘the camera never lies’.
As the book’s subtitle — Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop — indicates, contemporary digital editing simply applies new technology to a long-established practice. Fineman’s history begins barely a decade after the birth of photography, demonstrating that photographic manipulation is as old as photography itself. (Faking It also features commentaries on 200 photographs from a 2012 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.)
The book includes Pictorialist composite images such as Henry Peach Robinson’s Fading Away, novelty double-exposures, airbrushed propaganda portraits, and Surrealist and Dadaist photomontages (covered in depth by Dawn Ades in Photomontage). The most recent examples are from the start of the computer era, such as a 1982 National Geographic magazine photograph in which two Egyptian pyramids were digitally pasted closer together.
Fineman argues that the photographic canon favours realism over artifice — in other words, the ‘new objectivity’ of Edward Weston and Albert Renger-Patzsch outlasted the ‘new vision’ of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy — and she attributes this to Beaumont Newhall’s “keen preference for straight photography.” (Fineman recognises that Newhall’s History of Photography did “more than any other English-language publication to establish photography as a subject of serious art-historical study.”) She later identifies Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void photograph as a turning point that paved the way for more experimentation and manipulation.
As the book’s subtitle — Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop — indicates, contemporary digital editing simply applies new technology to a long-established practice. Fineman’s history begins barely a decade after the birth of photography, demonstrating that photographic manipulation is as old as photography itself. (Faking It also features commentaries on 200 photographs from a 2012 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.)
The book includes Pictorialist composite images such as Henry Peach Robinson’s Fading Away, novelty double-exposures, airbrushed propaganda portraits, and Surrealist and Dadaist photomontages (covered in depth by Dawn Ades in Photomontage). The most recent examples are from the start of the computer era, such as a 1982 National Geographic magazine photograph in which two Egyptian pyramids were digitally pasted closer together.
Fineman argues that the photographic canon favours realism over artifice — in other words, the ‘new objectivity’ of Edward Weston and Albert Renger-Patzsch outlasted the ‘new vision’ of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy — and she attributes this to Beaumont Newhall’s “keen preference for straight photography.” (Fineman recognises that Newhall’s History of Photography did “more than any other English-language publication to establish photography as a subject of serious art-historical study.”) She later identifies Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void photograph as a turning point that paved the way for more experimentation and manipulation.
