Photo Hoax Test
I stumbled across this site on a Plastic.com quicklink.
Neat: I got 9/10 on the first page, and 8/10 on the second. I think most of it comes from spending too much time surfing the web, since a number of the images are familiar, or have come from Snopes. A number of the other show clear signs of photo fakery. A long time ago, I actually did read a book on the history of photo fakery. I bought it after an idle Sunday afternoon of flipping through channels on the TV (this was before Tivo) and coming across a talk given by the author on C-SPAN. Shockingly, I was interested enough to buy the book he was talking about. Yes, C-SPAN’s book hour actually sold something.
Anyway, most of the photo fakery discussed in the book were from the Cold War era, where Communist propaganda machines would churn out agitprop — some of it crude, some of it brilliant — and rewrite history. The most famous instances are when Politburo members fell out of favor with Stalin, and their images were purged from the official photographs, usually by very clever cutting and pasting (cutting and pasting was literal then, with scissors, glue and photographic prints and negatives). Part of the book discussed some techniques used by photoanalysts to try to discern the real from the fake. These generally involve careful inspections of shadow and tone, and, more involved, measurements of proportions.
There’s also a bit of photoanalysis of real pictures of fakes, most significantly that of Mao and his group of body doubles. You can tell them apart in a clear enough photo by examining their ears — the ridges and folds of the pinna are relatively idiosyncratic. Or they may be pictures that are mislabelled: through triangulation of shadows, you can tell that a person was in such-and-such a plaza at a particular day, and a particular time.
Interesting stuff. I recall the author said that digital techniques have gotten so good, it’s impossible to tell a good fake from the real thing. Most of the hoax photos circulating on the Net, though, are quick Photoshop jobs, and it’s not hard to figure out that the shadow is all wrong.
