History is riddled with the remnants of photographic tampering. Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, Castro and Brezhnev each had photographs manipulated—from creating more heroic-looking poses to erasing enemies or bottles of beer. In Stalin’s day, such phony images required long hours of cumbersome work in a darkroom, but today anyone with a computer can readily produce fakes that can be very hard to detect.
For the full article on image manipulation see Scientific American June 2008.
