The Met’s “Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop” shows how photographers have been cheating since shortly after the medium’s invention almost two centuries ago.
Perhaps you have seen the famous photograph of a dirigible touching its nose to the tip of the Empire State Building. I had always thought there was some factual basis for this improbable image, and indeed there was. The building’s developers had announced plans to create an aerial mooring post where travelers from Europe could debark. The idea turned out to be unfeasible because of dangerous winds, but the photographic vision of its realization — a montage created by an unknown artist in 1930 — went out over the news wires and continues to circulate over the Internet today, causing many like me to wonder, did this really happen?
That photograph is one of more than 200 on display in “Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop,” an absorbing if not revelatory exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Organized by Mia Fineman, an assistant curator in the museum’s department of photography, the show offers abundant evidence that photographers have been cheating since shortly after the medium’s invention almost two centuries ago.
via New York Times
