A picture is worth 1,000 lies.

• Author: Saltzman, Joe
• Position: Manipulating photographs

DO NOT BELIEVE WHAT YOU SEE. Today's technology makes manipulating and altering photographs so easy that a child can do it. Johnny is at bat and misses the ball. No problem-move the ball from under the bat to right on the bat and see Johnny swing for the fences. New software makes anything possible, from the simple white lie (cleaning up a spot on a child's dress for her second birthday picture) to outrageous distortion (if junior flunked out of school, his smiling face can be put on the body of a graduating senior holding up a diploma). When it is family lore, the cheating might be ignored. Yet, when news photos are compromised, "seeing is believing" and "a picture is worth a thousand words" ring hollow. How can we be sure that what we see is true, that it is a real representation of what actually took place?

Manipulating news photographs and moving pictures is not new. Photographers have been rearranging reality by staging and manipulating negatives ever since photography began. They did it in the Civil War. Most of the war photos blatantly were staged. Newsreel cameramen from silent film days on created reality for their cameras--in war time, opposing armies fought in front of the camera as friendly soldiers put on the enemy's uniforms and ran after each other. Carefully constructed miniatures were bombed and set ablaze and the pictures sold as depicting the real thing.

Throughout the 20th century, many events were staged especially for the camera. It used to be common practice for photographers to carry a broken doll in their trunk so they could place it at an accident site to create a poignant news photo. This practice only went out of fashion when too many photographs of train wrecks and freeway crashes featured a twisted doll in the foreground.

A Dartmouth College computer scientist, Hany Farid, has created a website that documents digital tampering in the media, politics, and law. As he points out, "Photography lost its innocence many years ago." Farid writes that, "as early as the 1930s, shortly after the first commercially available camera was introduced, [the Soviet Union's Joseph] Stalin had his enemies 'air-brushed' out of photographs." Some of his early examples show a famous portrait of Pres. Abraham Lincoln in 1860--a composite of Lincoln's head and a Southern politician's body. An 1865 Mathew Brady photograph adds a missing general to a picture so his documentation of Gen. William T. Sherman posing with his generals would...