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12/5/12 ‘Faking It’ at the Met, a Photography Exhibition - NYTimes.com
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Collection of George Eastman House,International Museum of Photography and
Film, Rochester
Faking It This Metropolitan Museumexhibition on manipulation inphotography includes this image by anunknown artist from about 1930.
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ART REVIEW
Their Cheating Art: Reality and Illusion‘Faking It’ at the Met, a Photography Exhibition
By KEN JOHNSONPublished: October 11, 2012
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.
The types of images Ms. Fineman has in mind are not those
that involve staging or altering scenes in front of the
camera. She is not concerned with whether Roger Fenton
moved the cannonballs in his photographs of Crimean War
battlefields. She has focused, rather, on changes made in
dark rooms and studios some time after the click of theshutter. So the exhibition features prints made from altered
negatives; seemingly realistic images made by piecing
together two or more negatives; handcolored blackand
white prints; Surrealistic montages and the like. They date
from 1846 to the early 1990s.
In Ms. Fineman’s view, the history of fakery in photography
is as old as the medium itself. In her catalog essay she
further asserts that “there is no such thing as an absolutely
unmanipulated photograph.” This is less controversial thanit sounds. Today only a viewer of childlike naïveté would
not recognize that the technical processes that bring a print
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Metropolitan Museum of Art
A dirigible docked on the Empire StateBuilding.
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Galeria Jorge Mara — La Ruche, BuenosAires, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Grete Stern’s “Dream No. 1: ElectricalAppliances for the Home” (1948).
to its finished state necessarily involve considerable shaping
of the supposedly virginal reality captured by the camera.
A technical problem in the 19th century, for example, was
that photographic emulsions were disproportionately
sensitive to blue and violet light, resulting almost always in
overexposed skies. So like many other landscape
photographers, Carlton E. Watkins inserted properly
exposed clouds from a different negative into the blank sky
in a grand view of cliffs along the Columbia River in
Oregon that he shot in 1867. In the exhibition you can
compare one print without and one with the interloping
clouds. Though artificially produced, the print with clouds
looks more natural.
But, you might ask, is tweaking to achieve more realistic
effects in the same category as flimflam? At about the same
time that Watkins was photographing out West, the
journeyman studio photographer William H. Mumler made
a name for himself selling “spirit photographs,” in which
ghostly visitors appeared in portraits of real people. If you
look at his prints now, it is hard to believe that anyone
could have been deceived by them, but many were, until the
law intervened and charged him with fraud and larceny.
And then again, is Harry Shunk’s “Leap Into the Void”
(1960), the famous photograph of the Conceptual artist
Yves Klein diving out of a secondstory window above an
empty street, in the same category as Mumler’s spirit
photographs? Along with the picture of Klein’s supposedly
netless jump, another shows people on the ground holding
up a tarpaulin to catch him safely.
These puzzling questions become even more confounding when you consider the
exhibition’s obviously trick photographs, like those of giant ears of corn on flatbed railroad
cars or of celebrities whose heads have been grafted onto anonymous bodies. Such images
have been circulating throughout popular culture for more than a century, and at this
point few sentient people remain unaware that photographs can be, and often have been,
altered to amuse, advertise, propagandize and deceive, as well as to increase aesthetic
palatability.
That being the case, the exhibition is not terrifically newsworthy, though it is consistently
interesting and often entertaining. Note, for example, a group of jokey 19thcentury
images by various artists of still living people with their heads displaced from their necks.
To make sense of it all, you need to understand that Ms. Fineman’s mission is to challenge
something that is absent from the show: a different view of photography that prevailed
among the intelligentsia for most of the 20th century. That was the idea that a great
photograph must be transparently truthful. Canonized eminences of modern
photography, from Stieglitz and Weston to Arbus and Winogrand, took the world straight,
with no cosmetic or fantastic chaser. What they and their cameras saw was putatively
what you got.
But the truthfulness of straight photography came under suspicion in the 1970s, most
resoundingly in Susan Sontag’s “On Photography,” which indicted the medium for
voyeurism and other crimes. Since then, doubting the capability of any representational
system to convey naked truth has become obligatory in academic circles. The advent of
digitization and Photoshoptype software has only affirmed the now orthodox conviction
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12/5/12 ‘Faking It’ at the Met, a Photography Exhibition - NYTimes.com
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A version of this review appeared in print on October 12, 2012, on page C23 of the New York edition with the headline: TheirCheating Art: Reality and Illusion.
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that not only does reality elude representation but also that truth itself may be just a
misleading chimera.
(Ms. Fineman has also organized “After Photoshop: Manipulated Photography in the
Digital Age,” a small, separate exhibition of works by contemporary artists using
Photoshop and similar software, which is at the Met through May 27.)
We are left, then, to wonder. If photography cannot capture truth, what is it good for?
Leaving aside the everincreasing use of imaging technology for identification,
surveillance, scientific and medical discovery and so on, what is its special purpose as far
as art is concerned? While a good answer to that question does not emerge from this
exhibition, it offers much that any new theories must take into account.
“Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop” runs through Jan. 27 at theMetropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 5357710, metmuseum.org.
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