‘Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is assistant curator Mia Fineman’s response to a persistent question she has been asked over the past five years: Have digital technology and software programs that alter an image with a few clicks on a comkeyboard destroyed faith in the evidentiary truth of photography?
Her persuasive answer: not nearly as much as we’ve been led to believe. Supported by an astute selection of some 200 works that goes back to the painted daguerreotype and forward to darkroom alchemy from the early 1990s, she argues that photographers have been “lying” to us since the medium’s invention, often with our encouragement.