Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop

Description

It is a long-held truism that "the camera does not lie." Yet, as Mia Fineman argues in this illuminating volume, that statement contains its own share of untruth. While modern technological innovations, such as Adobe's Photoshop software, have accustomed viewers to more obvious levels of image manipulation, the practice of "doctoring" photographs has in fact existed since the medium was invented.

In Faking It, Fineman demonstrates that today's digitally manipulated images are part of a continuum that begins with the earliest years of photography, encompassing methods as diverse as overpainting, multiple exposure, negative retouching, combination printing, and photomontage. Among the book's revelations are previously unknown and never before published images that document the acts of manipulation behind two canonical works of modern photography: one blatantly fantastical (Yves Klein's Leap into the Void of 1960); the other a purportedly unadulterated record of a real place in time (Paul Strand's City Hall Park of 1915).

Featuring 160 captivating pictures created between the 1840s and 1990s in the service of art, politics, news, entertainment, and commerce, Faking It provides an essential counterhistory of photography as an inspired blend of fabricated truths and artful falsehoods.

296 pages, 249 full-color illustrations. 9 1/2'' x 10 1/2''. Hardcover, clothbound.

Named one of Modern Art Notes' Best Books of 2012 and to Amazon's 2012 list of Books of the Year in the Art and Photography category.

Editorial Reviews

“As ‘Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop’—an important new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, accompanied by curator Mia Fineman’s illuminating book of the same title from Yale University Press—shows us, the habit of aggressively adjusting photographs is actually an activity dating back to photography’s earliest days, and one that exposes a central question about the truth or artifice of the medium."
       — The Boston Globe

“engrossing… A talented writer, Met assistant curator Fineman traces photo “fakery” to the dawn of the medium more than 150 years ago when 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”
       —Publishers Weekly

“In the 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-dimsensional 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."
       —BOMB Magazine

“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.”
       —World Of Interiors

“Faking It, Mia Fineman’s comprehensive history of manipulated photography… meticulously researched …Intriguingly, Fineman looks at how image manipulation has been used to similar ends within very different contexts… many fascinating stories in this book.”
       —Creative Review