Images have been manipulated since the camera was invented, long before the faux vintage filters of instagram took over the world. Next month the Metropolitan Museum of Art opens an exhibit entitled Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop. Featuring hundreds of photographs from the 1840s through the 1990s, it is the first major exhibition devoted to “the history of manipulated photography before the digital age.” Before computers photos were altered using a variety of techniques, including multiple exposure (taking two or more pictures on a single negative), combination printing (producing a single print from elements of two or more negatives), photomontage, overpainting and retouching the negative or print. In the 1990s I studied photography for a few years in high school and college, and used a lot of these older methods with no training whatsoever in image-editing and other software programs. The last decade shows how much photography has changed in such a short amount of time.
Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop – Metropolitan Museum of Art
