The world’s first faked photo

[snopes]

Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris may have uncovered the world's oldest staged photograph, a wartime image taken in 1855.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow...200024911.html

[Cervus]

Staged isn't the same as fake, though. He didn't manipulate the photographic slides or film, he didn't go back later and add things onto the film that were not present in the original photographs. He just moved cannonballs around to stage a shot.

[UEL]

It depends upon what you mean by fake.

He passed it off as a photo from war. Indeed, it was during a war, but the photo was of his impression of war.

There was no scene like the one he represented.

It's like me getting my brother (a white male) to dress as a cop take a photo of him beating his buddy (a black male) and calling it "current US race relations". Staged, but not true. It may be my intention to give you my impression of race relations through this photo (for the record, that is not my impression).

It is still fake.

[Richard W]

I thought this picture has been strongly believed to be staged for years. Perhaps the new bit is that the guy has found evidence of the order in which the two pictures were taken, which shows that the cannonballs were placed there for the second photo rather than moved away.

It's possible that the cannonballs used to be on the road but had been cleared away before the first photo, and the photographer just had them put back to show the way the scene had actually been.

[ganzfeld]

Does this mean the first fake is not Daguerre's famous Photographer With Mange?
http://www.natemaas.com/2010/11/first-fake.html
(I don't see how, since it predates the other.)

[CenTex]

When I took photography in college, we had a lecture series about ethics in photography, particularly photojournalism. From what I recall Matthew Brady (Civil War Photographer) would move bodies around on the battlefield in order to get the shot he wanted. While it is not manipulated in post production, it is still manipulated in that he is no longer capturing images of the scene as it was.

A photojournalists job is to capture the scene "as it is," to convey to the viewer what really happened. Moving things around, suggesting that someone engage in a certain activity, or manipulating the negative (or digital file), take the photo from the realm of capturing a scene to inventing a scene.