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Now You See Him, Now You Don't: Paris Exhibition Exposes Retouched Historic Photographs
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12589 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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6 / 1987 |
1,636 Words |
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Michael Gibson
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"How does the little bumblebee improve the shining hour?" an edifying Victorian poet once idly wondered, to which Lewis Carroll ironically echoed: "How doth the little crocodile improve his shining tail?"
The question and the spoof drifted into my mind the other day as I was walking through the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris looking at an exhibition, based on a book by Alain Jaubert devoted to the practice of retouching photographs for political motives. Here was a neat and often chilling demonstration of the ways in which the "shining hour" in the lives of the great and even the "shining tail" of history can be improved quite beyond recognition thanks to the retouchers' inconspicuous craft.
Photographs were shown in pairs - "before and after" - revealing how they had been doctored in the newspapers and history books of totalitarian countries (and occasionally in others, too) and how people who should not have been there (according to the official version history) were painlessly removed, while others, who somehow failed to keep their appointment with destiny, miraculously appeared in places where they had never been.
Overpainting
It all begins innocuously enough. Every newspaper has its retoucher. The International Herald-Tribune in Paris, for instance, has been using the talents of Jean-Pierre Risos for many years. According to Risos, "A retoucher is meant to serve the truth by painting out confusing details and, when necessary, making the picture clearer and easier to read." The retoucher applies his gouache on a positive enlargement that is subsequently photographed all over again - a routine matter in newspapers. Like the reporter, the retoucher should obviously be guided by an ethical code. But whenever a medium can serve the truth, it can also become a tool of forgery and propaganda.
A famous photo that appeared in the Soviet textbooks in the early twenties shows Lenin striking a characteristic pose as he harangues the troops from a makeshift wooden tribune. Behind him, standing on the steps of the tribune, Trotsky and Kameniev wait their turn. But only a few years later, Stalin forced Trotsky to flee the country and finally had him murdered in Mexico. Even today, Trotsky's presence in the picture places a tiresome burden of explanation on historians who had played down his role in the past. Thus, in a Soviet publication of 1964, a quasi-identical view of the scene still shows Lenin and all the same figures standing around in the crowd - only Trotsky and Kameniev have vanished like Hamlet's ghost at daybreak. We now see nothing but the wooden steps and the floor of the tribune.
The same sort of tinkering with history has been practiced in China: When Peng Chen, the former mayor of Beijing, was out of favor, he vanished from several photos that showed him standing next to Mao. When reinstated after the campaign against the "Gang of Four," Peng just as suddenly reappeared. Meanwhile Mao's widow and her allies were in turn consigned to oblivion. But this time the anonymous retoucher did not even take the trouble of closing the ranks of the leadership, and the long line, spread across the stage, shows two obvious gaps caused by the removal of the four hated silhouettes. A desultory attempt was made to paint in the gray and shapeless crowd standing in the distant background, but it was
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