... capture of an event which has happened yet has also passed. (Tagg, 1988, 1). The first real problem with trusting photographs and giving them the virtue of an inexplicable truth is that photographs have been altered, doctored and faked since nearly as long as we have had photographic technology. A famous example from the 1920s saw photographic editing at the request of Stalin to 'erase' out of favour Leon Trotsky from a picture with Lenin. The before and after shots can be seen in Figures 1 and 2. There are a great many other examples from history of photographs that have or could have been altered or simply just faked. Figure 3 is a picture taken from 1917 where two little girls created a fake picture of some fairies which at the time convinced a great number of people of the existence of fairies. This story was turned into a feature ...

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