Doctored photos: 20 memorable picture fakes

**tarak** · 06-09-2008 03:16 PM

The doctoring of photos, once considered the reserve of tyrants and UFO nuts, is becoming increasingly widespread.

With photo-editing software becoming ever more sophisticated, and the internet allowing instant distribution, it has never been easier to create and spread hoax images.

Below we present 20 of the most striking, interesting and controversial fake photos, most of them produced in the last five years.

Some were created to amuse, some to mislead, while others were an attempt to rewrite history.

And although the credulity of the internet has been blamed for allowing hoax photos to flourish, several of the fakes below were actually uncovered by bloggers after being distributed by mainstream media outlets.

1) Shark lunges at helicopter

This striking fake was created by merging two separate images - a US Air Force helicopter on a training exercise in San Francisco, and a great white shark leaping out of the water off the cost of South Africa.

The hoax emerged in 2001, and was later circulated via email with a caption claiming it showed a shark attacking British Navy crew in South Africa, despite the fact that the Golden Gate Bridge is visible in the background.

2) World Trade Centre tourist

This hoax emerged on the internet just weeks after the Sept 11 attack. Although rational assessment of the picture quickly reveals its flaws (how could the tourist not hear the plane? how did his camera survive?), the horror of the scenario and the rawness of America's wounds gave the image a huge emotional impact.

It also sparked a flurry of tongue-in-cheek parodies featuring the same tourist pasted into ever more preposterous situations.

3) Iranian missile test

Tehran's Revolutionary Guards wanted the test firing of nine ballistic missiles in July this year to send a message to the world. So when one of the missiles failed to launch, they released a doctored photo with the faulty launcher removed and one of the successful rockets copied and pasted in its place.

Unfortunately for the Guards the original launch photo, complete with grounded missile, had already been published in an Iranian newspaper, and the crude deception was revealed to great amusement in the West.

4) Ann Widdecombe's mixed messages

Ed Matts, the Tory candidate for Dorset South, hoped a photo of him and popular former minster Ann Widdecombe holding signs calling for tighter immigration controls would endear him to voters ahead of the 2005 general election.

But the plan backfired when it emerged that he had doctored to messages on the signs for his election literature, and that in the original photo the pair were actually holding placards calling for a family of failed asylum seekers to be allowed to stay in Britain.

Ms Widdecombe defended the Tory candidate, saying that she was "happy to be associated with either message".

5) Chairman Mao airbrushes out his former friends

The Chinese Communist leader had no scruples about re-writing history to suit his current circumstances. He arranged to have Po Ku, a former ally with whom he had fallen out, removed from the official version of the photo above.

And Mao's photoshopping tendencies lived on even after his death. This photo of a memorial service held for the leader in 1976 was later altered to remove the so-called "Gang of Four", the political clique who were subsequently charged with treason.

6) Snowball the monster cat

This photo of an enormous cat spread around the world over email in 2000, sometimes accompanied by a background story claiming that the mother of the animal had grown up near a Canadian nuclear lab.

It wasn't until the following year that the man in the photo came forward to admit he'd faked the image on his computer.

Cordell Hauglie had sent the photo to friends as a joke, not expecting it to circulate more widely. The cat did exist, and belonged to Mr Hauglie's daughter, but weighed only 1.5 st.

7) Smoke over Beirut

The Reuters news agency withdrew this photo showing bomb damage in Beirut during the 2006 Lebanon War after bloggers pointed out that repeat patterns in the smoke looked like they had been created by Adobe Photoshop's "clone" tool, with the effect of exaggerating the effects of the Israeli assault.
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The altered photo
Reuters admitted that it had been doctored by Adnan Hajj, the Lebanese freelancer who took the original photo, and have since removed all his images from their archive. Bloggers have accused Hajj of manipulating other photos during the conflict.

The original
8) Antelopes and trains in harmony

This image of a herd of Tibetan antelopes running undisturbed beneath a train on the new Qinghai–Tibet railway was released by Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency, as evidence that the controversial high-speed line was not damaging the environment.

It was named "most memorable news photo of the year" by China Central Television, but after users of a photography website pointed out flaws in the image, the photographer Liu Weiqiang admitted that he had created it but stitching together two separate pictures.

9) Tsunami captured from tower block

This extraordinary image was sent to inboxes across the world shortly after the 2004 tsunami, along with a caption claiming it was taken moments before the huge wave swamped Phuket in Thailand.

But the photo was a fraud on both counts - the seafront was actually that of the Chilean city of Antofagasta, and the wave had been digitally added. The Asian tsunami, while deadly, did not produce towering waves of the type portrayed in the image.

10) Bush reading upside down

This photo of George W Bush holding a picture book the wrong way up during a visit to a school delighted some opponents of the Republican president, and helped foster his buffoonish image.

But press photos from the event in 2002 revealed that Mr Bush had been holding the book correctly - hoaxers had simply used photo editing software to rotate the cover.

11) Shark sneaks up on scuba divers

This photo was an submitted as an entry for an online photo-editing contest on the theme of "Vacation Bloopers", but was then spread around the web by email with an accompanying blurb claiming it was taken by the pictured couple's son during a scuba diving holiday in Australia.

The narrative claimed that the boy's parents refused to believe they had been so close to a shark until they had the pictures developed.

12) John Kerry with Jane Fonda

The 2004 Democratic presidential candidate was a known anti-Vietnam activist, so the idea that he shared a podium with actress and peace campaigner Jane Fonda wasn't too far-fetched.

But the photo that circulated around the web in election year was a fake, a composite of two other images. Ken Light, who took the original photo, said that the doctoring "tells us more about the troublesome combination of Photoshop and the Internet than it does about the prospective Democratic candidate for president."

13) Giant skeletons discovered in India

The National Geographic Society still receives inquiries about this photo, which was published in an Indian newspaper in 2007 to support an article claiming that the Society's archaeologists had discovered the remains of giant humans.

The photo, which had been created in jest as past of a photo-editing competition, had been circulating on blogs and conspiracy websites for many years.

14) Benito Mussolini, the fearless horseman

The sword-wielding Italian fascist leader had the horse handler removed from this portrait, to give him amore heroic aspect.

15) Karl Rove's 'secret file'

When this image of George W Bush's top adviser leaving a restaurant carrying a file marked "Coptix" emerged on the web, it appeared to confirm rumours of a secret White House email system used for nefarious purposes.

But the image was a prank knocked together by staff at Coptix - a web firm whose named had been incorrectly linked to the alleged email system - and bloggers who had seized on the photo as evidence of a sinister Republican network were forced to eat humble pie.

For the record, Rove had been at the restaurant - a BBQ eatery called Porkers - but was not carrying any folder.

16) James Purnell doctored at hospital

In 2007 the then Culture Secretary James Purnell, who led the Government's attack on the BBC's rigged phone-in competitions, was caught up in a faking controversy of his own after his image was digitally added to a line-up of MPs outside a hospital.

Mr Purnell had arrived too late to take part in the photo shoot, and agreed to the photoshopping because he didn't want to let anyone down, his spokesman said. "In retrospect it wasn't a great idea," he added.

17) Soldier doll held hostage in Iraq

An insurgent group calling itself the Al Mujahedeen Brigade posted this photo of a man it claimed was a US soldier called John Adam in 2005, threatening to behead him unless Iraqi prisoners were released.

The group's claims made the press, until a toy firm executive came forward and said the pictured soldier was actually one of its action dolls, known as "Special Ops Cody".

18) Fidel Castro made to look like Hitler

When this photo showing the Cuban leader with dark, sleek hair and a Hitler-style moustache was published in a Cuban newspaper, Communist officials went into a panic, scurrying around the island to seize copies before they could be sold.

Although the exact details about what happened are unclear, it appears the front page photo was digitally altered by an anti-Castro member of staff at the Granma newspaper.

19) Oil rig, tornado and lightning strike

This dramatic storm scene has been circling the web in various forms for years. The twister-lightning combination is a genuine photo, taken by an amateur photographer in Florida in 1993, but the oil rig was pasted from a separate picture.

20) Cottingley Fairies

One of the earliest ever photo hoaxes, and arguably the most famous. Cousins Elsie Wright, 16, and Frances Griffiths, 10, claimed to have photographed a group of fairies near their home in Bradford in 1917.

The cousins insisted they had met the fairies for decades, despite a growing consensus that they were cardboard cut-outs. In 1981 the cousins admitted they had faked the photos.