Thanks to Twisted Sifter for a page with 15 Photo Manipulations Before the Digital Age published in advance of Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York which claims to be the first major exhibition devoted to the history of manipulated photography before digital and will feature “200 visually captivating photographs created between the 1840s and 1990s in the service of art, politics, news, entertainment, and commerce“. The show runs from 11 October 2012 to January 27, 2013, and there is currently a short text about the show on the Met Site but not much more unless you have a press login, when I think you would be able to see the same 15 images as on Twisted Sifter.
Some of these are well-known – for example Henry P Robinson‘s very Victorian deathbed scene, Fading Away, Toulouse Lautrec as artist and model (by Maurice Guibert) and others by Maurice Tabard, Barbara Morgan, Grete Stern, a decidedly odd (aren’t they all) F Holland Day and one of Gustave Le Gray‘s cloud studies, but perhaps the more interesting are some of the commercial and anonymous images, including a ‘Man on Rooftop with Eleven Men in Formation on His Shoulders’, Saint Thomas DAquin’s ‘Man Juggling His Own Head’ and a daguerreotype of a man with two heads.
From the text I’m not sure how much this show will add to previous exhibitions and books which have featured such images – which I think have always got more than their just share of attention. They are an interesting side line, and often amuse, which is what some of them were meant to do. But some of those that amuse, their authors meant to be taken seriously.