Two-headed daguerreotypes, Dadaist photomontages, and how the subversion
of optical reality got its start.
"The painter constructs,
the photographer discloses," Susan Sontag
famously asserted in On Photography. But
in the quarter century since, the rise of digital photography and image
manipulation software has increasingly transmogrified the photographer into a constructor of
reality, a reality in which believing is
seeing. Still, image manipulation dates much further back – in fact,
to the dawn of photography itself. Faking It: Manipulated
Photography Before Photoshop (public library), the
companion book to the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition
of the same title, traces the evolution of image manipulation from the 1840s to
the 1990s, when computer software first began to revolutionize the alteration
of photographs.
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