Long before artificial intelligence, photographers altered images to burnish the reputations of politicians—from Lincoln to Stalin.
This photograph is a montage or composite of several images and does not actually show General Ulysses S. Grant at City Point, Virginia. Three photos provided different parts of the portrait.The rise of artificial intelligence or AI has made photo manipulation easier and more accessible than ever. And under the right circumstances, these images could wreak political havoc.
The AI tools that produce fake images may be novel, but there’s nothing new about the act of editing photographs for political spin. Long before deepfake entered the lexicon, manipulated photographs in the 19th and 20th centuries attempted to shape the image of world leaders.As long as there have been photographs, people have been editing them. Photography pioneers believed pictures were more than objective records of reality.
“Airbrushing was common to remove physical imperfections, specifically in images of Stalin, who had scars from smallpox and injuries to the left side of his body from a childhood injury.”Photo manipulation also served a more nefarious purpose during Stalin’s regime. “ was a means of rewriting history according to Stalinist policies and principles,” says Werneke. “Stalin and his supporters took this process to a whole new level in physically erasing individuals from images.
Provenance is only part of the puzzle, however. “Expert conservators can examine the physical properties of a photograph to understand when something is out of the ordinary in the chemical composition, paper age, or applied coloring,” explains Messenheimer.
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