by A Russian soldier raises a Soviet flag on Berlin’s Reichstag in Yevgeny Khaldei’s well-known 1945 victory photo.
But in the original image, the officer standing below can clearly be seen wearing a watch on both wrists. Khaldei’s shot, first published in a Moscow magazine, was quickly retracted and the extra watch, which may actually be a military compass, was removed for safety. Looting was not a good look and was punishable by death.
This little-known work of deliberate visual distortion is featured in a new exhibition, The Camera Never Lies, which opens later this month and tackles the public’s diminishing faith in photographs. Tristan Lund, co-curator of the new show, said: “The ‘before’ and ‘after’ prints are rarely seen together. One watch was scratched on Khaldei’s photo which later came out because the editors knew that this tiny detail might incriminate not only the officer but the entire Soviet army.
“In the second image, the sky is also much darker and more dramatic. It was heavily manipulated for effect.”
The exhibition, featuring more than 100 images by world-renowned photographers including Don McCullin, Stuart Franklin, Robert Capa and Dorothea Lange, will demonstrate that a picture, no matter how good, cannot be a complete story. Although few images have been shown to be deliberately distorted, the interpretations of many have sparked controversy and disputed accounts.
The show, at the Sainsbury Center in Norwich, features shots of the assassination of President Kennedy, the Chinese protester “tank man” in Tiananmen Square, and a chilling image of a figure jumping from New York’s burning World Trade Center in 2001. Running from May 18 to October 20 as part of the six-month What is Truth? series, it looks at how context, sometimes combined with technical manipulation, has changed events in modern history.
The role of photographs as a trusted and reliable source is increasingly under threat, with editing technology now readily and cheaply available. In March, it was discovered that family shots edited by the Princess of Wales had been edited, and the Observer He revealed that other candid royal photos had been quietly altered before.
Lund said that he and his colleague, Harriet Logan, appreciate the “inherent truth” of the work they show, although he believes it is a central question of our age: “The exhibition asks what truths can be we really hope to benefit from it. photo. Is the concise and objective sharing of facts what we remember most from a single image, or is it the emotion that inspires the photographer’s composition and creativity that tells a thousand words?”
Visitors will be able to compare three of the four images of Tiananmen Square that have entered the news archive. Franklin’s 1989 shot “The Tank Man” depicts the moment when the Chinese government cracked down on a long demonstration of democracy in Beijing, killing hundreds on June 4. The unidentified protester standing in front of a line of tanks was photographed from different angles by cameras inside the same building, documenting a scene heavily censored in China but in the west an emblem of oppression.
“Young people may not know where the picture came from and, if they recognize it, they probably have a composite of all the photos in their mind,” said Lund. “One image zooms in on the protester and another image is slightly further out and includes the distraction of a street lamp. Franklin’s has more of the street and tanks.
“We wanted to take each one out of its news context to slow down how people might look at them. We’re showing it with Kate Adie’s BBC report from Tiananmen and with a work we’ve commissioned from a contemporary Chinese artist whose father was in the square. Some of his friends did not survive. She does not want her name to be known because she wants to continue visiting her family in China.”
“Beijing has always denied it happened,” said Logan, a former news photographer. “But for the public, the image is often a creation, a kind of verbatim truth, which allows us to relax about what we are told about uncomfortable events. Many of the images in the exhibition, like the one called “Napalm Girl”, from Vietnam, are now part of history.”
This disturbing image of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, taken as a naked young girl fleeing a napalm attack, represents a 20-year war now, said Lund. The same thing happened with Capa’s 1936 photograph “The Falling Soldier” from the Spanish civil war. The story behind this shot is disputed, due to the lack of background information provided by Capa at the time and the loss of negatives. Some suggest it was staged. Later research established the location and revealed that the starting line was a long way from us that day.
“Capa was only 21 when he took the [shot] and will have sent back an unprocessed roll of film that may not have the correct title on it. That’s what happened,” Logan said. “I worked back in the analog days, and later picture editors cut photos and made decisions that defined an image. So, when Capa got home he will have a lot of truths in his image.”
Seven and nine years later another Magnum photographer, Max Pinckers, stood on the same hill with a colleague and made the artwork Controversy, now also in the show. Using a high resolution camera they recorded the landscape, which is now empty except for olive trees.
