Staged Photographs: A Media Problem

Since the mid-1800s, photographers and graphic artists alike have altered their camera’s output. Wartime images seem particularly prone to distortion, as propaganda demands drama to win hearts and minds. Thankfully, blogs have investigated recent images that seem too good (or too awful) to be true and these writers have shown the world that we need to keep a sharp eye trained on what the media offers to an international viewing audience.

Staging photos and videos is one problem within the realm of altered images that has existed for decades. Take, for instance, the notorious “Case of the Cottingley Fairies” as told by the James Randi Educational Foundation:

“In 1917 two innocent-seeming English schoolgirls, 16-year-old Elsie Wright and her 10-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths, launched a deception that somehow managed to fool many people over the following years, including the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. While playing in Cottingley Glen, just behind the Wright home, the girls took what they claimed were close-up photographs of winged fairies dancing amid the foliage. The girls then took each other's picture with the wee creatures, and photo experts who were consulted said that the images were not double exposures nor had the negatives been altered. The simple fact is that the girls had just posed with very obvious cutouts of fairy drawings to make the "authentic" pictures.”