The skepticism that dogs photography these days took root long before the existence of digital intervention. “Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop,” the savvy, eye-opening exhibition that the curator Mia Fineman has organized at the Met, finds evidence that, within a decade of its invention in 1839, the medium was already a clever mix of fiction and fact. Early photographers, many trained as painters, made up for technical limitations by altering their prints—adding color, combining images, filling a blank sky with fluffy clouds. Later fabrications were both more sophisticated and more outlandish, populating drawing rooms and battlegrounds with people who had never been there. In Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, and Mao’s China, politicians and cronies who fell out of favor mysteriously disappeared from group portraits. And though trick photography filled the tabloids and postcard racks, it also had an important place in the avant-garde: for Erwin Blumenfeld and Claude Cahun, John Baldessari and Martha Rosler, making the picture trumped taking it. ♦
