“Pictures or it didn’t happen.” So runs the immediate social media retort to any claim deemed too extraordinary to be true. Carried within it is an assumption shared across the globe which has held firm almost since the invention of the camera: that the ultimate form of proof is the photograph. The idea is so strongly fixed in the human mind, it has acquired the status of a law of nature, one obvious even to a child: the camera never lies.
Except it does, as the images collected here vividly attest. We may think of AI deepfakes, and their Photoshop predecessors, as thoroughly modern menaces, corrupting a previously innocent, reliable medium, but we would be wrong. It turns out people have been doctoring photos, manipulating and meddling, from the start. “Honest” Abe Lincoln was not only the first sitting president to be photographed, but the first to be the subject of a photo fake.
It’s not hard to fathom why those in the darkroom were tempted to play tricks with the technology as soon as they learned that they could. The most obvious motive is the one that fuelled so much early photographic output: PR, or propaganda. It must have seemed only natural to superimpose Lincoln’s head on to the body of another man – an enslaver, as irony would have it – if that would yield a more heroic image of the president. The same goes for the portrait of civil war general Ulysses S Grant, depicted at the centre of a military scene that was in fact three scenes combined into one. You want the leader to look as strong and noble as possible. If that means showing him on horseback, while quietly removing the handler who kept the animal under control as the snap was taken, you’ll do it – or at least you will if you’re in charge of optics for Benito Mussolini.
The beauty of photo manipulation for those practising politics’ black arts is it can be deployed both to make your side look better and to make the other side look worse. The North Koreans could add extra hovercraft to make their military appear more lethal, while Republicans in the 2004 US presidential campaign could put Democratic contender John Kerry alongside “Hanoi Jane” Fonda, as if the two had appeared on a platform together, denouncing the Vietnam war, a generation earlier. It never happened, but the picture says it did – and, as we all know, a picture is worth a thousand-word correction.
Politics is never far away, even when those in the frame are not politicians. Look no further than the darkened image of OJ Simpson that appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1994, when the former sports star became a murder suspect, the picture seemingly altered to make a Black man look blacker.
Less than a decade later, the then editor of the Daily Mirror, Piers Morgan, resigned after the paper ran staged photographs that purported to show the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by British soldiers. It seemed clear that the source of the pictures was motivated by opposition to the war, but that same sentiment surely also explained Morgan’s readiness to be taken in by them. After all, British soldiers had committed abuses in Iraq. Sometimes, that’s how fakes sneak through: though false, they point to a truth.
But if the political benefits, and dangers, of fakery are obvious, more intriguing are the manipulated images that serve no such clear purpose. Vanity can play a role – including that of the photographers, seeking acclaim as even more accomplished artists than they already are. Witness the forensic evidence suggesting Robert Capa’s stunning image of a falling soldier is likely to have been posed.
Money is a factor, naturally. The bigfoot footage might have been a commercial scam, although if it was, it was one that required an almost obsessive commitment. Even revenge can drive someone to concoct an optical illusion: think of the hunter of the Loch Ness monster who, humiliated by the Daily Mail, got his own back by duping them with an image of the sea monster that was too good to be true.
But more mysterious are those fakes that have no clear explanation. The prankster who concocted a snap of himself on the roof of one of the twin towers just before a plane crashed into the building did it as a poor taste joke, to be circulated among his friends. Yet we know there are others who claimed, falsely but in earnest, that they survived 9/11 or other terror attacks. What accounts for that, beyond the desire for attention, to be at the centre of a historic event?
Of course, none of it would work without us, the viewer. Fake images proliferate and endure because they show us what we want to see. Posters of UFOs were captioned “I want to believe” for a reason. They realise fantasies, or dreads, that would otherwise linger only in our imaginations. They make our dreams – or our nightmares – come true.
Picture captions by Felix Bazalgette, Gabrielle Schwarz and Emma Loffhagen
* * *
Leap into the Void, 1960
By Yves Klein
In 1960, French artist Yves Klein stunned the world with Leap into the Void, an image that appeared to capture him mid-flight, fearlessly leaping from a rooftop in Paris. In reality, it was two negatives combined – and the tarpaulin held by friends was removed in post-production.
Klein forbade photographers Harry Shunk and János Kender from revealing how they had created the photos, with Shunk claiming he was threatened with legal action. It wasn’t until 50 years later that the mechanics of the leap were fully revealed. EL
* * *
Wales family photograph, 2024
Edited by the Princess of Wales
“Like many amateur photographers,” the Princess of Wales said, “I do occasionally experiment with editing.” This inexpert attempt at Photoshopping might have been a mildly embarrassing royal footnote last year, were it not for the fevered context in which it was released. The princess had made unusually few public appearances in late 2023 and early 2024; a palace announcement that she was recovering from abdominal surgery did not quieten public curiosity as to her whereabouts. When this family photograph was released to mark Mother’s Day, several news agencies quickly issued a dramatic “kill notice” for it, identifying several signs of heavy editing, including around Princess Charlotte’s hand, contrary to guidelines for news images. The princess apologised “for any confusion” and later that month announced she had been diagnosed with cancer, dampening the speculation that had gripped the press. FB
* * *
OJ Simpson on the cover of Time, 1994
By LAPD/Matt Mahurin
After American football star OJ Simpson was charged with murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman, Time and Newsweek both made his mugshot their cover. But while Newsweek used the original image, Time showed Simpson’s skin drastically darkened – done, critics claimed, to make a Black man appear more threatening. Time apologised, but insisted the alteration was simply an artistic decision. EL
* * *
Mussolini on horseback, 1937
By Luigi Leoni
When Italy first invaded and occupied Libya in 1911, Benito Mussolini, at the time a socialist, publicly opposed the colonial attack. Two decades later, the fascist Mussolini would declare himself ruler of “Italian Libya” and a “Protector of Islam”, to mark which title he was photographed in 1937 holding aloft the sword of Islam, a ceremonial weapon.
The original image, taken by photojournalist Luigi Leoni and showing a groom dutifully holding the leader’s horse, initially appeared on newspaper front pages – but editors soon learned to crop and airbrush out the groom, to better foster the image of an independent, aristocratic, warlike leader. By the 1940s, the image without the groom had become the standard version, and it created the enduring visual signs of the strongman leader – when Nigel Farage makes a speech atop a tank, or Vladimir Putin displays his bare chest, both are drawing on iconography developed by the Italian fascist. FB
* * *
Frame 352 of the bigfoot film, 1967
By Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin
No other scrap of film – apart from perhaps the Zapruder footage showing JFK’s assassination – has been so exhaustively analysed as the Patterson-Gimlin film, named for the two cowboys who shot it, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin. In October 1967 the two men rode into the woods of northern California with a camera after a number of sasquatch, or bigfoot, sightings in the area. As the hairy figure emerged, Patterson said, his horse panicked and reared up; after a few seconds, he was able to grab his camera from a saddlebag and record a short snatch of footage, before the creature disappeared into the tree line. Frame 352, of the figure turning to look at the camera, remains the iconic image of the bigfoot movement.
“The Patterson-Gimlin film stands at a crucial place in photographic history,” says Steven Streufert, who has made a long-term study of the footage. “It’s either the greatest hoax ever or a stunning piece of wildlife imagery.” Streufert co-led an expedition in 2011 to identify the film’s remote wooded location, an effort that led to him being named Bigfoot Times’s Bigfooter of the Year.
For Streufert, the film stands “closer to the moon landing than the Cottingley fairies” as, unlike the latter, it has never been conclusively debunked and still inspires obsessive study. Patterson died a few years after it was filmed, while Gimlin, now in his 90s, maintains that the footage shows a real sasquatch.
To true believers (and some scientifically trained commentators), the figure has inhuman proportions, a distinct gait and visible muscle mass moving beneath its fur, all of which would be difficult to achieve if it was a person wearing a furry suit. Comparisons with the unconvincing costumes in the Planet of the Apes, released a year later, suggest that if they were faking it, Patterson and Gimlin – both rodeo riders and horse wranglers – were highly skilled costume designers for their time.
“I’m a sceptic,” Streufert says, reflecting on his lifelong engagement with the film, “but to me that means being curious.” The footage, and the culture around it, is compelling to him because of the broader question it poses: “Why do humans believe in things that are not supposed to exist?” FB
* * *
The Book of Veles, 2021
By Jonas Bendiksen
Photojournalist Jonas Bendiksen first heard about the run-down North Macedonian city of Veles in 2016, when it was identified as a hub for fake news production in the US presidential election. Around then, he also became aware of computer-generated images, and “wanted to test whether we were prepared for a world where we cannot tell CGI from photojournalism”.
The Book of Veles (a title borrowed from a known literary forgery, which purported to be an ancient Slavic text) is the result. Using 3D modelling tools, Bendiksen inserted digital avatars into empty backdrops shot in Veles, claiming they were real portraits of tech-savvy local youths who had found an unlikely source of income operating websites that churned out pro-Trump stories. He published the images in a photobook alongside an essay written with a prototype of ChatGPT.
To Bendiksen’s surprise, no one clocked him – on the contrary, he was invited to present the project at a prestigious photojournalism festival. So he decided to drop clues on social media, creating a fake user who accused him of paying his subjects. Eventually a real user, Benjamin Chesterton, noticed that the fake account’s profile picture looked like one of the avatars in the book.
“It shows we see what we want to see,” says Bendiksen. “If something is packaged up in the right way and conforms to what we expect, we are at risk of buying into anything.” GS
* * *
Abraham Lincoln portrait, 1865
By William Pate
The US president’s assassination in 1865 led to demand for heroic portraits of him – and to one printmaker getting a little too creative. In this print, attributed to engraver William Pate, the Great Emancipator’s head is superimposed on to an engraving of John C Calhoun, a political rival and supporter of slavery. The source photo was flipped, so Lincoln’s mole appears on the wrong side of his face. GS
* * *
Alpine UFOS, 1970s
By Billy Meier
In 1976 the unusual claims of a Swiss man began to appear in the press. Eduard “Billy” Meier maintained he had made contact with a race of aliens hailing from the Pleiades, and offered as proof dreamy images of their spaceships over rolling alpine landscapes – supposedly taken with their permission. In the coming decades, Meier would release a flood of such images, write bestselling books about his alien friends and become a media fixture and countercultural icon. Mulder’s office in The X-Files features one of his images, with the slogan “I want to believe”.
Julio Rojas, a writer and film-maker who has spent the last two years making a documentary about Meier, says the pictures are “possibly the most beautiful ever captured of an unidentified flying object”. Though many, including Meier’s ex-wife, have observed that some of the UFOs are clearly household objects such as bin lids, Rojas finds the images fascinating – not only because they “established the visual canon” of flying saucer imagery, but also for their beauty and variety, “ranging from technical awe to deliberately careless and mocking images”, which seem to taunt the viewer.
Meier, now 88, insists his images depict a race of aliens who have been in contact with him for decades. Interviewing him, Rojas thought he perceived “a quiet certainty” rather than an intention to deceive. “His world – whether real or false to us – is entirely real to him.” FB
* * *
Baby Hitler, 1933
By Acme Newspictures
“They’ve made a sourpuss out of my son,” complained Harriet May Warren Downs to Life magazine on 2 May 1938. Five years earlier, doctored images of her baby, purporting to show the newly elected fuhrer as a one-year-old, had been distributed by Acme Newspictures. “This is a picture of a man who controls the destiny of a mighty nation,” said the Winnipeg Free Press, while the Chicago Tribune ran the picture next to one of Hitler as an adult, addressing a meeting of farmers.
The latter caused a diplomatic scandal, with the German consulate complaining of blatant “falsification”. The Tribune blamed the picture agency, which “insisted the original came from Austria”, according to Life. Downs’s letter, about “the dreadful monstrosity”, would finally confirm the true identity of the baby, but the hoaxer who stole and doctored the image remains a mystery. FB
* * *
North Korean hovercraft, 2013
By Korean Central News Agency
Amid heightened tensions, with the US and South Korea carrying out military drills, the North Koreans released a series of photos of a hovercraft assault drill on a desolate, snowy beach. The images had already been distributed by some western news agencies, in0cluding AFP and Getty, before Alan Taylor, an editor at the Atlantic, spotted some “digital twins”, cloned by a photo editor to create a more menacing impression of multiple hovercraft bearing down on the beach. FB
* * *
Ralph Lauren Blue Label jeans poster, 2009
By Ralph Lauren
While photo editing has long been standard practice in fashion, one 2009 incident broke the unspoken boundaries of acceptability. In a poster for Ralph Lauren Blue Label jeans, the fashion house so severely slimmed a photo of 23-year-old Swedish-French model Filippa Hamilton (a UK size eight) that her head ended up appearing bigger than her pelvis.
The results were ridiculed online, and Ralph Lauren was forced to apologise, saying, “We have learned that we are responsible for the poor imaging and retouching that resulted in a very distorted image of a woman’s body.”
The saga took another turn when Hamilton claimed she had been fired by Ralph Lauren for being “too fat”. On the US TV show Today, she said she had received a letter stating, “We’re terminating your services because you don’t fit into the sample clothes you need to wear.”
Hamilton said of the Photoshop debacle, “They owe American women an apology … I’m very proud of what I look like, and a role model should look healthy.” EL
* * *
The Cottingley fairies, 1920
By Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright
One day in the summer of 1917, nine-year-old Frances Griffiths and her 16-year-old cousin Elsie Wright went down to the stream at the foot of their family garden in West Yorkshire. They took a camera – to get proof, they said, that fairies lived there, as Frances had always told her parents that was the reason she kept coming home with wet shoes. This is the fourth of five images the girls captured over a few years at Cottingley Beck – in some you can almost detect a mischievous glint in Frances’s eyes.
Merrick Burrow, an academic and curator of an exhibition of the Cottingley fairy photos, describes them as an “accidental hoax”. “The prank was intended only for their immediate family, and it was only after Arthur Conan Doyle got wind of the photos that they reached wider attention.” Doyle was (somewhat incongruously, as creator of the arch-rationalist detective Sherlock Holmes) a dedicated spiritualist – these photos, he argued, clearly established the reality of the supernatural realm.
Amazingly, they weren’t conclusively debunked until the 1980s, when the cousins finally admitted they had staged the scenes using hatpins to prop up cut-out drawings of fairies based on children’s book illustrations, then disposed of the evidence in a stream. Until her death, however, Frances still claimed that the last photograph the pair took was real. GS
* * *
Elvis gets a buzzcut, 1957
By United Press
When it was announced in 1957 that, at the height of his fame, Elvis was to be drafted into the US army, it was his hair that quickly became the focus of media attention. His legions of fans were so worried about him having to shave his signature pompadour and sideburns that some politicians even investigated whether he could get an exemption from military buzzcut regulations.
Amid the furore, the United Press agency decided to create a mock-up of what the king of rock’n’roll might look like with the typical GI hairstyle, retouching a photo of the singer to remove his quiff (and leaving him with a somewhat disfigured head). “Not all manipulated photographs are intended to deceive,” notes Mia Fineman, a curator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and author of Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop.
The following year, hordes of photographers and reporters gathered at an army training centre in Arkansas to document the real thing. The widely circulated photographs of Presley’s actual army haircut have long since eclipsed the imagined version. EL
* * *
General Grant at City Point, 1902
By LC Handy
This one-time historical document, depicting Union forces commander Ulysses S Grant at City Point, Virginia, during the American civil war, sat quietly in the US Library of Congress for more than a hundred years before a reference assistant at the prints and photographs division raised questions about it in 2007. Kathryn Blackwell noticed a number of anomalies: the strange angle of the famous general’s neck; the stiff, uncertain pose for someone known to be an expert rider; the horse that does not resemble any of Grant’s known horses; and the uniform, which did not reflect Grant’s rank. Blackwell established that the image was actually a composite of three photographs – the general’s head, a major general’s body and horse, and a background of Confederate prisoners – probably produced by photographer LC Handy for commercial purposes in 1902, well after the American civil war. FB
* * *
Roosevelt on a moose, 1912
By Underwood and Underwood
Teddy Roosevelt was famously outdoorsy, but this cut-and-paste image was debunked soon after it appeared online 15 years ago, when the archives of the photography firm that produced it, Underwood and Underwood, were digitised. It was part of a triptych of 1912’s presidential candidates, each atop the animal associated with their party; Roosevelt’s new Progressives were nicknamed the Bull Moose party.
* * *
Going Places, 1998
By the Leeds 13
In May 1998, art students from the University of Leeds, later dubbed the Leeds 13, pulled off one of the most notorious media hoaxes in British history. As part of a conceptual art project, they documented a fake luxury holiday to Spain, photographing themselves sunbathing, swimming and sipping cocktails, supposedly on the Costa del Sol, in a trip funded by a university grant.
In reality, the group never left the UK. Using inflatable paddling pools, sunbed tans and carefully angled shots, they staged the photos in a project titled Going Places, even going so far as to film themselves coming through arrivals at Leeds Bradford airport.
Sensationalist headlines followed, with tabloids condemning the group’s supposed misuse of taxpayers’ money. A few days later, they revealed live on Radio 4 that the whole thing had been staged. “We had to disappear for a week, laying low in our student houses and only nipping to the corner shop in disguise,” recalls one member of the group, who wants to remain anonymous. “Until the moment we walked out of arrivals, hauling luggage and gifts supposedly from the Costa del Sol, we lived in a perpetual state of paranoia.” All the Leeds 13 received a first for their final exams. EL
* * *
Abraham Lincoln’s ghost, 1870
By William H Mumler
Before “ghosts” started to appear on William H Mumler’s photographic plates in the early 1860s, spiritualism had been a religious movement defined by knocks and taps, seances and mediums. Now spirit photography spread around the world. Mumler credited the images to the “wonderful magnetic powers” of his wife, a medium, but sceptics claimed they were simple double exposures, and Mumler was hauled into court in the late 1860s, after he had made a fortune selling his images to Americans grieving after the civil war. He was ultimately acquitted for lack of evidence, but not before his reputation had been ruined.
After the trial, Mary Todd Lincoln, the famous spiritualist and widow of Abraham Lincoln, visited Mumler to test his powers, leading to his most famous image. According to his autobiography, she used a false name and hid her identity with a veil up until the moment the photograph was taken. When the figure of her husband appeared on the plate, Mumler’s wife reported that Mary wept “tears of joy”. FB
* * *
Falling Soldier, 1936
By Robert Capa
“It happened in Spain,” Robert Capa recalled in a radio interview 11 years after the photograph was taken. “It was very much at the beginning of my career.” He recalled how he huddled in a trench with Republican soldiers, taking cover from fascist machine-gun fire. As a few doomed soldiers tried to charge the enemy, Capa held his camera above his head and snapped a picture without looking; he sent the undeveloped films straight to an editor in France, never seeing the image of a soldier at the moment he was shot until he returned from the war months later. By then it had been published in the French magazine Vu to great acclaim, establishing his reputation at just 22.
That, at least, was Capa’s story. After his death in 1954, people began to ask questions about the image – was it really taken at the Battle of Cerro Muriano on 5 September 1936? Does it really show someone being shot? For Professor José Manuel Susperregui, at the University of the Basque Country, study of the image has become his life’s work. “What caught my attention,” Susperregui says over email, “was the geometric shape of light-coloured terrain in the lower right corner. It seemed strange to me, and became my main reference for locating the photograph.”
Susperregui couldn’t find this distinctive form in the landscape of Cerro Muriano, so he assembled a wider panorama of the area from other photos Capa took on the same day, and circulated it to town halls across the country, asking for assistance. Eventually a student recognised it as a piece of open ground known locally as Llano de Vanda – 55km south of the frontline at the time the image was supposed to have been taken. This cast doubt on Capa’s tales of trenches and machine gunners.
Susperregui’s work has brought him into conflict with powerful photography institutions, including Magnum, the agency founded by Capa, and the International Centre of Photography in New York. The image still provokes debate; some argue its symbolic value is more important than whether it was staged. Susperregui is not convinced: “According to press photography association statutes, no staging or falsification is allowed.” FB
* * *
Iraqi detainee, 2004
Hoaxer unknown
On 1 May 2004, the Daily Mirror published a series of incendiary images apparently depicting the abuse of an Iraqi detainee by the Queen’s Lancashire regiment in Basra. The photographs, published just days after the infamous images of abuse by the US army in Abu Ghraib, seemed to show British soldiers beating a handcuffed prisoner and urinating on him. Prime minister Tony Blair condemned the images as “utterly unacceptable” and foreign secretary Jack Straw promised a thorough investigation.
Within two weeks, however, the editor who had published them – one Piers Morgan – would be leaving in disgrace, after military sources insisted the images were fake: the rifle seen was not issued to soldiers in Iraq, nor were the hats they wore, and the truck shown was not used there at the time. They argued, therefore, that the images were staged. Morgan was sacked on 14 May.
The furore threatened to overshadow the fact that regiment members were linked to horrific abuses in Iraq, including the torture of 26-year-old hotel receptionist Baha Mousa, who later died of his injuries. Though nobody was convicted, an inquiry found serious failings in army leadership, planning and training had led to the abuse, with British soldiers inflicting “violent and cowardly” assaults on Iraqi civilians. Morgan has continued to stand by his decision to publish the images, telling Politico in 2013, “I refuse to apologise. And to accept they were necessarily fakes.” FB
* * *
The doomed tourist on 9/11, 2001
By Peter Guzli
In the days after the September 11 attacks, a chain email with a photograph of a man on the observation deck of the World Trade Center, seemingly moments before one of the planes hit, started doing the rounds. “This was from a camera found in the wreckage,” the message claimed. “The guy still has no name and is missing.” Soon he was identified as Peter Guzli, a very much alive Hungarian tourist who had digitally edited a holiday snap taken four years earlier (a “joke intended for my friends only”, he later insisted).
In retrospect there were obvious clues of fakery, not least the heavy coat worn by Guzli on a warm September day. “Tourist Guy” soon became a meme, appearing in online images at the sites of other historical disasters, from the sinking of the Titanic to JFK’s assassination. GS
* * *
Snowball the giant cat, 2000
By Cordell Hauglie
“My daughter wanted to send an electronic photo of her cat to her friend,” Cordell Hauglie told reporters. “I got a little carried away.” The image, a modest experiment with Photoshop, spread across the internet, often with a tongue-in-cheek report blaming atomic radiation. It sparked arguments online and was even featured on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Good Morning America. The experience led Hauglie to warn about “the dangers of email … if some dumb guy and his dumb cat can go around the world, you’ve got to be careful”. FB
* * *
John Kerry and Jane Fonda, 2004
By Richard Taylor
This image, appearing to show presidential candidate John Kerry next to Jane Fonda at an anti-Vietnam war rally in the 1970s, was part of a rightwing smear campaign focused on his military record. Kerry, a Vietnam vet, had spoken out against the war – but this scene linking him to “Hanoi Jane” never happened. A man called Richard Taylor had digitally spliced together two photos and added a fake headline and credit to create the look of an old newspaper clipping. Several media outlets, including The New York Times, ran the image before it was debunked.
Photographer Ken Light, who shot the original Kerry photo in 1971, was “incredibly upset” and, looking back, thinks this image influenced the election: “A colleague told me his father was going to vote for Bush because of it.”
His advice for spotting fake images today? “Trust the photographer, know the source. Look closely – if photos seem too fantastic, they probably are.” GS
* * *
Helicopter Shark, 2001
Hoaxer unknown
Helicopter Shark spread like wildfire across the internet in 2001, the text assuring viewers that “although this looks like a picture taken from a Hollywood movie, it is in fact a real photo”. It was in fact two real photos: Charles Maxwell’s shark and Lance Cheung’s US air force helicopter. The text also stated this was National Geographic’s photograph of the year, a claim the magazine had to publicly deny.
To this day the hoaxer is unknown. “I’d like to make contact,” Maxwell said at the time, “not to get him or her into trouble, but because it’s fun and a good job.” FB
* * *
Jennifer in Paradise, 1987
By John Knoll
John Knoll took this photograph of his future wife Jennifer (“The next day I proposed to her”) on a beach on the South Pacific island of Bora Bora in 1987. Back home, he and his brother Thomas started using “Jennifer in Paradise” to demo the new image-editing software they were developing, doing things like cloning her figure or adding another island. “It presented good opportunities to show the capabilities of the tool we were building and I found it pleasant to look at,” says Knoll, who keeps a copy of the first test image – untampered with – as a personal memento. After Adobe bought Photoshop in 1988 and released it in 1990, the brothers’ creation went on to became a worldwide phenomenon. GS
* * *
Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man, 1840
By Hippolyte Bayard
In 1839, to much fanfare, the French government announced it had obtained the rights to the daguerreotype – and would give it “free to the world”. Billed as the first viable photographic process, it was named for inventor Louis Daguerre. But fellow Frenchman Hippolyte Bayard felt unjustly overlooked as creator of the equally viable “direct positive” process. In response, he staged this dark joke: an image of himself apparently driven to suicide by neglect of his work. “The corpse you see here is Monsieur Bayard, inventor of the process you have just seen,” he wrote on the back of the print. GS
* * *
The Balenciaga pope, 2023
By Pablo Xavier
The danger of deepfake tech was memorably demonstrated when this shot of Pope Francis in a Balenciaga puffer jacket went viral in March 2023. It was made using Midjourney, an AI tool that turns text prompts into images. The eagle-eyed may spot clues to its origins, such as the wonky shadow cast by the pope’s glasses and the strange grip of his hand – not to mention the unlikelihood of his flashy attire. But many were fooled.
The image’s creator, a man from Chicago called Pablo Xavier (he withheld his surname, fearing a backlash), told reporters he’d been messing around with Midjourney for a laugh: “I just thought it was funny to see the Pope in a funny jacket.” GS
* * *
The Loch Ness monster, 1934
By Robert Kenneth Wilson
Among more than 1,100 reported sightings of the monster said to inhabit the Scottish Highlands loch – including one in January this year – none has made as big a splash as the “surgeon’s photograph”, credited to a physician named Robert Kenneth Wilson and published in the Daily Mail in 1934.
Many were sceptical, but no one could explain the photo either – until the 1990s, when retired art teacher Alastair Boyd unearthed a little-read article from 1975 in which a man called Ian Wetherell admitted helping stage the image. His father Marmaduke, a big-game hunter, had wanted to get back at the Mail after they debunked his previous claim to have found Nessie’s footprints (actually from a cast made of a hippo’s feet). The long-necked creature seen here was fabricated from wood putty attached to a toy submarine – later sunk in the mud when a water bailiff approached – and Wilson was recruited as a frontman to submit the photos. Despite what he’d uncovered, Boyd remained convinced of Nessie’s existence: “I would stake my life on it,” he said. GS
* * *
Stalin and Nikolai Yezhov, 1937
Photographer unknown
The era of Stalinist purges in the late 1930s, with its dizzying re-evaluation of political figures and past events, was a busy time for photo retouchers. “So much falsification took place during the Stalin years,” wrote the author and collector David King, “that it is possible to tell the story of the Soviet era through retouched photographs.” King’s book from 1997, The Commissar Vanishes, documents how retouchers – working by hand, using brushes, scissors and glue – diligently removed from the historical record figures who had fallen out of favour (they even smoothed out Stalin’s pockmarks).
Leon Trotsky was a common target, systematically erased from many photographs documenting his prominent role in the Russian Revolution of 1917. Another famous victim was Nikolai Yezhov, Stalin’s one-time confidant, who went from being head of the NKVD, the secret police, to execution in little more than three years. In the original of this image, Stalin walks with Yezhov next to the Moscow-Volga canal; after his fall from favour, he was scrubbed out. FB
• These 28 images show photographic fakes that have fooled the world. Which others come to mind for you? Email saturday@theguardian.com
• This article was amended on 12 April 2025. Owing to an error introduced during editing, an earlier version of the text accompanying the Teddy Roosevelt picture referred to Underwood and Underwood having digitised their archives; in fact that company ceased trading in the 1940s but images were later digitised by the owners of works from its collection.
