Photo Tampering Throughout History [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Photo Tampering Throughout History [pdf]

faculty.cc.gatech.edu

47 pointsnateb202210 comments

I think the case of the Cottingley Fairies (1917) should be included here. Concocted by a pair of teenage girls with a camera and paper cutouts, it fooled many including Arthur Conan Doyle. It's featured in the first chapter of James Randi's book "Flim-Flam!".

One amazing thing about this case was that many believed the photos to be authentic simply because they believed the girls were incapable (both in terms of character and skill) of this level of deception.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies

Afaik the photos weren't altered, it was just posing with paper cutouts.

Just one more thing:

One of my favorite Columbo episodes, "Columbo and the Murder of a Rock Star", involved the murderer's girlfriend faking an alibi by wearing a paper mask of the murderer and running through a traffic light with a speeding camera, which Columbo figured out because the shadows were wrong.

The Mask of A Murderer | Columbo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_Zk90re50A

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101602/goofs/#not_a_goof

>Incorrectly regarded as goofs

>The killer's fake alibi hinges on a speed trap photo. An accomplice drove his car past a speed trap wearing a mask, a flat photo of the murderer's face. This is demonstrated by Columbo towards the end of the show.

>In that demonstration, it is clear that the person wearing the mask can't see, and Columbo helps her to exit his car. The photo of the speed camera also shows the killer's eyes, there were no visible holes in the mask. Allegedly, this means that the accomplice supposedly drove the car fast enough to set off the speed trap, while completely blind. However, a person can see reasonably well through the mask by simply poking a few pin holes through the eyes. These would not be visible on the police camera but are sufficient to allow the driver to see.

The Russian soldier raising the flag on the Reichstag is a pretty good example of this too. The looted extra watches on his wrist were removed before publication.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_a_Flag_over_the_Reic...

These are good of examples of why all the pearl-clutching around LLM's potential for deep-fakery are likely overblown. We've been dealing with fakery for millenia. Some new tech comes around, we get fooled a few times, then quickly get wise to the con.

To be clear, the pearl-clutching serves an important function, to raise awareness of the threat so that we can more quickly/effectively mitigate it. But many people take it much farther than that, calling for govt intervention or for companies to halt work until certain under-specified goals can be achieved.

Yep. It's good that individual human people can do this now. Only nation states and large corporations/institutions being able to was a bad state of things. The alterations used to be only done for non-human person reasons and were rare enough people actually fell for them.

The Wayback Machine has preserved the original, so you can click on the links to individual photographs:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110606171835/http://www.cs.dar...

Enver Hoxha, the Albanian dictator from 1944 to 1985, also had the habit of having photos altered to remove former allies that fell out of favour and just generally making himself look better, but he's not included in this pdf. To be fair there's probably examples of historical altered photos from any dictator or sufficiently authoritative government after the invention of photography.

I'm surprised at the omission of Robert Capa's Spanish Civil War photograph, highly likely to have been staged... or is staging not considered because it's not "altering" a photo, just faking it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Falling_Soldier

The pdf includes famous altered images from the 2006 Lebanon war but not other well known staged ones from the same conflict, so maybe the author does consider staging a different category?

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