12/5/12
‘Faking It’ at the Met, a Photography Exhibition - NYTimes.com
HOME PAGE
TODAY'S PAPER
VIDEO
MOST POPULAR
Subscribe to Home Delivery
U.S. Edition
U.S.
N.Y. / REGION
BUSINESS
TECHNOLOGY
ART & DESIGN
BOOKS
SCIENCE DANCE
HEALTH
MOVIES
MUSIC
Help
Search All NYTimes.com
Art & Design WORLD
cross3...
SPORTS
OPINION
TELEVISION
ARTS
THEATER
STYLE
TRAVEL
VIDEO GAMES
JOBS
REAL ESTATE
AUTOS
EVENTS
ART REVIEW
Their Cheating Art: Reality and Illusion
Log in to see what your friends are sharing on nytimes.com. Privacy Policy | What’s This?
By KEN JOHNSON Published: October 11, 2012
What’s Popular Now
‘Faking It’ at the Met, a Photography Exhibition
Perhaps you have seen the famous photograph of a dirigible touching its nose to the tip of the Empire State Building. I had always thought there was some factual basis for this improbable image, and indeed there was. The building’s developers had announced plans to create an aerial mooring post where travelers from Europe could debark. The idea turned out to be unfeasible because of dangerous winds, but the photographic vision of its realization — a montage created by an unknown artist in 1930 — went out over the news wires and continues to circulate over the Internet today, causing many like me to wonder, did this really happen? Enlarge This Image
Collection of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester
Faking It This Metropolitan Museum exhibition on manipulation in photography includes this image by an unknown artist from about 1930.
Connect With Us on Twitter Follow @nytimesarts for arts and entertainment news.
Arts Twitter List: Critics, Reporters and Editors
A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York
FACEBOOK TWITTER
Despite Bob Dole’s Wish, Republicans Reject Disabilities Treaty
Log In With Facebook
Mayor Clinton? Bloomberg Urged Her to Consider a Run
GOOGLE+ EMAIL SHARE PRINT REPRINTS
That photograph is one of more than 200 on display in “Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop,” an absorbing if not revelatory exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Organized by Mia Fineman, an assistant curator in the museum’s department of photography, the show offers abundant evidence that photographers have been cheating since shortly after the medium’s invention almost two centuries ago. The types of images Ms. Fineman has in mind are not those that involve staging or altering scenes in front of the camera. She is not concerned with whether Roger Fenton moved the cannonballs in his photographs of Crimean War battlefields. She has focused, rather, on changes made in dark rooms and studios some time after the click of the shutter. So the exhibition features prints made from altered negatives; seemingly realistic images made by piecing together two or more negatives; handcolored blackand white prints; Surrealistic montages and the like. They date from 1846 to the early 1990s. In Ms. Fineman’s view, the history of fakery in photography is as old as the medium itself. In her catalog essay she further asserts that “there is no such thing as an absolutely unmanipulated photograph.” This is less controversial than it sounds. Today only a viewer of childlike naïveté would not recognize that the technical processes that bring a print
www.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/arts/design/faking-it-at-the-met-a-photography-exhibition.html
Get the TimesLimited EMail cross3@sva.edu MORE IN ART & DESIGN (1 OF 50 ARTICLES)
Change Email Address | Privacy Policy
Stretching Her Creativity as Far as Possible Read More »
MOST EMAILED
MOST VIEWED
1. To Stop Climate Change, Students Aim at College Portfolios 2. Removing ‘Sacrifice’ From ‘GlutenFree’
3. Cheering U.N. Palestine Vote, Synagogue Tests Its Members 4.
OPINION
5.
DRAFT
New Love: A Short Shelf Life
The Art of Being Still
1/3
12/5/12
‘Faking It’ at the Met, a Photography Exhibition - NYTimes.com
region, selected by Times critics. Go to Event Listings »
to its finished state necessarily involve considerable shaping of the supposedly virginal reality captured by the camera.
6. Pushing Science’s Limits in Sign Language Lexicon
A technical problem in the 19th century, for example, was that photographic emulsions were disproportionately sensitive to blue and violet light, resulting almost always in overexposed skies. So like many other landscape photographers, Carlton E. Watkins inserted properly exposed clouds from a different negative into the blank sky in a grand view of cliffs along the Columbia River in Oregon that he shot in 1867. In the exhibition you can compare one print without and one with the interloping clouds. Though artificially produced, the print with clouds looks more natural.
7.
BOOMING
8.
WELL
Enlarge This Image
Metropolitan Museum of Art
A dirigible docked on the Empire State Building. Enlarge This Image
Galeria Jorge Mara — La Ruche, Buenos Aires, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Grete Stern’s “Dream No. 1: Electrical Appliances for the Home” (1948).
When They’re Grown, the Real Pain Begins
For Athletes, Risks From Ibuprofen Use
9. Study Raises Questions on Coating of Aspirin 10. For Second Opinion, Consult a Computer?
Go to Complete List »
Show My Recommendations
But, you might ask, is tweaking to achieve more realistic effects in the same category as flimflam? At about the same time that Watkins was photographing out West, the journeyman studio photographer William H. Mumler made a name for himself selling “spirit photographs,” in which ghostly visitors appeared in portraits of real people. If you look at his prints now, it is hard to believe that anyone could have been deceived by them, but many were, until the law intervened and charged him with fraud and larceny. And then again, is Harry Shunk’s “Leap Into the Void” (1960), the famous photograph of the Conceptual artist Yves Klein diving out of a secondstory window above an empty street, in the same category as Mumler’s spirit photographs? Along with the picture of Klein’s supposedly netless jump, another shows people on the ground holding up a tarpaulin to catch him safely.
These puzzling questions become even more confounding when you consider the exhibition’s obviously trick photographs, like those of giant ears of corn on flatbed railroad cars or of celebrities whose heads have been grafted onto anonymous bodies. Such images have been circulating throughout popular culture for more than a century, and at this point few sentient people remain unaware that photographs can be, and often have been, altered to amuse, advertise, propagandize and deceive, as well as to increase aesthetic palatability.
Ads by Google
what's this?
Carpet Tiles by FLOR Custom Mix & Match Carpet Styles. Holiday Spirit Is Under Your Feet!
www.FLOR.com
That being the case, the exhibition is not terrifically newsworthy, though it is consistently interesting and often entertaining. Note, for example, a group of jokey 19thcentury images by various artists of still living people with their heads displaced from their necks. To make sense of it all, you need to understand that Ms. Fineman’s mission is to challenge something that is absent from the show: a different view of photography that prevailed among the intelligentsia for most of the 20th century. That was the idea that a great photograph must be transparently truthful. Canonized eminences of modern photography, from Stieglitz and Weston to Arbus and Winogrand, took the world straight, with no cosmetic or fantastic chaser. What they and their cameras saw was putatively what you got. But the truthfulness of straight photography came under suspicion in the 1970s, most resoundingly in Susan Sontag’s “On Photography,” which indicted the medium for voyeurism and other crimes. Since then, doubting the capability of any representational system to convey naked truth has become obligatory in academic circles. The advent of digitization and Photoshoptype software has only affirmed the now orthodox conviction
www.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/arts/design/faking-it-at-the-met-a-photography-exhibition.html
2/3
12/5/12
‘Faking It’ at the Met, a Photography Exhibition - NYTimes.com
that not only does reality elude representation but also that truth itself may be just a misleading chimera. (Ms. Fineman has also organized “After Photoshop: Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age,” a small, separate exhibition of works by contemporary artists using Photoshop and similar software, which is at the Met through May 27.) We are left, then, to wonder. If photography cannot capture truth, what is it good for? Leaving aside the everincreasing use of imaging technology for identification, surveillance, scientific and medical discovery and so on, what is its special purpose as far as art is concerned? While a good answer to that question does not emerge from this exhibition, it offers much that any new theories must take into account. “Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop” runs through Jan. 27 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 5357710, metmuseum.org. A version of this review appeared in print on October 12, 2012, on page C23 of the New York edition with the headline: Their Cheating Art: Reality and Illusion. FACEBOOK
GOOGLE+
EMAIL
SHARE
Get Free Email Alerts on These Topics Art
Photography
Metropolitan Museum of Art Ads by Google
what's this?
Nikon Official Site Buy Direct from Nikon for Huge Savings on Cameras, Lenses & More!
www.NikonUSA.com
INSIDE NYTIMES.COM DINING & WINE »
OPINION »
HEALTH »
BOOKS »
OPINION »
U.S. »
Editorial: Rigging the Financial System
GlutenFree Dishes Become More Tempting Home World
U.S.
Invitation to a Dialogue: How to Treat A.D.H.D. N.Y. / Region
Business
For Athletes, Risks from Ibuprofen Use Technology
Science
Health
Professor Who Learns From Peasants Sports
Opinion
Arts
© 2012 The New York Times Company Privacy Your Ad Choices Terms of Service Terms of Sale Corrections
www.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/arts/design/faking-it-at-the-met-a-photography-exhibition.html
Will authorities really hold banks and bankers accountable for manipulating interest rates?
Style
Travel
Jobs
Penn Museum Pushes for Broader Public Appeal
Real Estate
Autos
Site Map
RSS Help Contact Us Work With Us Advertise
3/3