Next to Joe Rosenthal's photo of raising the flag on Iwo Jima, Yevgeny Khaldei's photo of Soviet soldiers raising a flag on top of the Reichstag building in Berlin is perhaps the most famous photo of World War II.
But unlike the Iwo Jima photo, Khaldei's Reichstag photo was both staged and doctored.

Khaldei's photo was directly inspired by Rosenthal's Iwo Jima photo. Noting the publicity the Iwo Jima photo had received, Soviet officials (perhaps Stalin himself) ordered Khaldei to fly from Moscow to Berlin in order to take a similar photo that would symbolize the Soviet victory over Germany. Khaldei took a Soviet flag with him in his luggage.

When Khaldei arrived in Berlin, he considered a number of settings for the photo, including the Brandenburg Gate and Tempelhof Airport, but he decided on the Reichstag, even though Soviet soldiers had already succeeded in raising a flag over this building a few days earlier. Khaldei recruited a small group of soldiers and, on May 2, 1945, proceeded to recreate the scene (top).

Back in Moscow, Soviet censors who examined the photo noticed that one of the soldiers had a wristwatch on each arm, indicating he had been looting. They asked Khaldei to remove one of the watches. Khaldei not only did so, but also darkened the smoke in the background. The resulting picture (middle) was published soon after in the magazine Ogonjok. It became the version that achieved worldwide fame.

Subsequently, the photo continued to be altered. The flag was made to appear to be billowing more dramatically in the wind. The photo was also colorized.

Throughout his life, Khaldei remained unrepentant about having manipulated this, his most famous photo. Whenever asked about it, he responded, "It is a good photograph and historically significant. Next question please."

The bottom photo, taken in 2008, shows what approximately the same view from the top of the Reichstag looks like now.

In 1950 Millard Tydings (a U.S. Senator from Maryland) challenged Senator Joseph McCarthy by calling his allegation that hundreds of communists were working in the State Department "a fraud, a hoax, and a deceit." As payback, McCarthy's staff faked a picture (top) of Tydings (on the right) apparently chatting with Earl Browder (on the left), head of the American Communist Party. The truth was that Tydings had never even met Browder before July, 1950. The image was a composite of a 1938 photo of Tydings listening to the radio (middle) and a 1940 photo of Browder delivering a speech (bottom).

The photo was widely distributed shortly before the 1950 senate race in which Tydings ran against John Butler. It appeared in a pamphlet titled "From the Record" printed by a group calling itself Young Democrats for Butler. A caption acknowledged the photo was a composite. Nevertheless, the image is believed to have contributed to Tydings' subsequent defeat in the election.

Arthur Davis, head of the New York-based modeling agency Arthur Davis Associates, devised a novel way to get his models featured in newspapers. He submitted their pictures to the papers, accompanied by the claim that they had recently been awarded a title, such as "Miss Perfect Profile." He invented phony organizations, such as the "Plastic Surgeons Institute" to be the awarders of these titles.

Davis figured that the phony titles would make the photos seem newsworthy. Papers gladly took the bait, and his models received lots of publicity.

The top photo shows "Miss Perfect Profile." At other times she was "Miss Outdoor Girl." The bottom photo shows "Miss Water Conservation." More photos of Davis's models can be viewed in the Hoaxipedia.

A couple kisses passionately on a city street, oblivious to the pedestrians passing by. The image is one of the most famous in the world, reproduced on countless posters and coffee mugs. It was taken on April 1, 1950 by Robert Doisneau, on assignment for Life magazine, outside Paris' City Hall.

The photo was published in the June 12, 1950, issue of Life, but only became famous when it was republished in poster form during the 1980s. Doisneau steadfastly maintained it was a spontaneous scene, fortuitously caught on film. This greatly added to its appeal.

But in 1993 Doisneau was sued by Jean-Louis and Denise Lavergne, who claimed to be the couple in the scene. They demanded compensation for having their picture taken without their knowledge. In court Doisneau confessed he had actually used professional models to stage the scene, but the models were not the Lavergnes. They were Francoise Bornet (nee Delbart) and Jacques Carteaud. The Lavergne's case was dismissed.

Francoise Bornet subsequently sued Doisneau, seeking a percentage of the photograph's sales, but her case was also dismissed due to the fact she had waited forty-three years to make a claim. Jacques Carteaud, who had since become a winegrower, did not join her case. He noted that Doisneau had paid them 500 francs at the time, which he regarded as fair payment for their work.

UFOlogist George Adamski claimed that a Venusian scoutcraft visited him twice in 1952. On the second visit it flew low enough over his Southern California home in Palomar Gardens to allow to photograph it. He said he took these pictures with a Kodak Brownie box camera attached to a six-inch telescope. Adamski went on to write a number of books describing his contacts with aliens and attracted a large following. In 1959 he was even granted an audience with Queen Juliana of the Netherlands.

But not even diehard UFO believers take Adamski's UFOtographs seriously anymore. Skeptics note that the UFO looks like the top of a soft-drink cooler or a lamp shade, and there appear to be ping pong balls glued to the bottom of it. Jerrold Baker, one of Adamski's colleagues, later claimed to have seen the model used to fake these Venusian Scoutcraft photos.

W. Eugene Smith took this photo of Dr. Albert Schweitzer helping to build a hospital in the Congo. It served as the lead photograph in a photo essay about Schweitzer, titled A Man of Mercy, commissioned by Life magazine.

More than thirty years after its publication, researcher Glenn Willumson, who was writing Smith's biography, discovered something new about the photo. As he was sorting through Smith's negatives, he realized that the famous photo was actually two photos composited together. Schweitzer and the man behind him are from one negative. The hand and the saw in the foreground come from a second negative. Smith apparently inserted the hand and saw into the image to conceal an area of fogging on the main negative.

Smith's editors at Life never knew it was a composite image, because Smith had prepared the image in his own photo lab. This was a privilege he was allowed because of his status within the photographic community, and because he had complained about the poor quality of Life's photo labs. The alteration violated Life's editorial policy, but there has been little public criticism of Smith for having made the change.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, most moths in the UK were an off-white color, highly adapted to hiding from predators, such as birds, by resting on pale, mottled grey tree trunks. But the Industrial Revolution polluted the environment, raining soot down on the countryside. As a result, white moths became highly visible on the now blackened tree trunks. Black moths, on the other hand, such as the peppered moth (which had previously been quite rare), suddenly had a competitive advantage. They were well camouflaged on black tree trunks, and their numbers grew exponentially. By the early twentieth century, they were the dominant moth form in polluted areas of the UK.

The above story is considered the classic example of "evolution in action." It shows how an environmental change can give one form of a species a selective advantage, leading to its dominance. Its validity rests upon experiments conducted by researcher H.B.D. Kettlewell during the 1950s, which demonstrated that white moths do have an advantage over dark moths on pale trees, and a disadvantage on dark trees, and vice versa.

But what made the story of the peppered moth particularly popular was the visual evidence. In 1955 Kettlewell published a pair of photos showing the relative camouflage of the black and white moth forms in the two settings. In the top photo it is easy to see the black moth on the pale, lichen-covered bark and to imagine how a bird could pick it off, but the white moth is almost invisible. In the bottom photo, by contrast, the black moth is almost invisible while resting on a soot-blackened tree.

Since the mid-1960s most Biology textbooks have included the story of the peppered moth, accompanied by Kettlewell's two photos (or ones very similar to them). The ubiquity of the images made it that much more shocking when the public learned the photos were staged. Finding black and white moths posed beside each other in a natural setting would have been almost impossible, so to create the photos Kettlewell pinned dead moths to tree trunks. Moth experts knew the photos were staged because live moths would not have had extended wings. But no textbook ever disclosed this detail to readers.

The staging of the photos was first raised as an issue by intelligent-design advocate Jonathan Wells in his 2000 work Icons of Evolution. But the controversy reached a more mainstream audience in 2002 when science writer Judith Hopper discussed it in her popular account of the science of the peppered moth, Of Moths and Men.

The staging was an issue, critics argued, because it over-simplified the peppered moth story and made it seem that the camouflage of the moths was a self-evident advantage. However, it wasn't clear that moths rested on tree trunks during the day, as the pictures implied. Some evidence suggested they preferred to remain higher in the tree canopy and beneath branches where their coloration would have been less of an advantage. Also, it wasn't clear that birds were the main predator of moths. Bats also ate moths, and since bats use echolocation to navigate, the coloration of the moths would not have made a difference. Critics also questioned the methodology of Kettlewell's experiments.

Scientists still vigorously defend the peppered moth story as an example of evolution in action. They also defend the use of the staged photos in textbooks, arguing that, although they're not entirely accurate, they offer an invaluable way of presenting the concept of natural selection to students in an easy-to-comprehend form.

Nevertheless, the pair of images has become one of the most famous and controversial examples of staged photographs in all of science.

In February 1964, Scandinavian Airlines placed an advertisement in newspapers and magazines throughout America. It featured a bikini-clad blonde model posing on a rock above the caption "What to show your wife in Scandinavia."


The image above shows the ad as it appeared in most publications. However, the version (below) that appeared in the Los Angeles Times had one detail altered. The editors of the Times, in order to "conform to regulations," removed her belly button.

After police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald on suspicion of assassinating President Kennedy, they searched his home and found a picture of him standing in his backyard. In one hand he held a rifle, in the other copies of two communist newspapers, The Militant and The Worker. His wife, Marina, said she had taken the photo in the Spring of 1963. The photo was considered highly incriminating because the rifle he was holding appeared to be the one used to shoot Kennedy.

The photo was made public in late February 1964, simultaneously appearing on the cover of Life magazine and on the front page of the Detroit Free Press. Within days it had appeared in many other publications. But sharp-eyed observers noticed that the photo appeared to have been tampered with since details differed from publication to publication. In particular, details of the rifle differed. For instance, in the version that appeared on the cover of Life (top) Oswald's rifle had a sniper scope. But in the version that ran in the Detroit Free Press (bottom), the sniper scope was gone. The Detroit Free Press version reappeared two weeks later in Newsweek.

These differences created suspicions that the photo was fake. Oswald himself, when shown the photo in jail, claimed he had never seen it before and insisted someone had superimposed his head onto another body. However, the photo was real. The variations (and accidental erasure of the sniper scope) were caused by photo editors touching up the photo in different ways in order to heighten the contrast between dark and grey areas. This was a common practice in the publishing industry at the time, due to the limitations of the printing process.

This explanation did not satisfy all skeptics, some of whom continued to argue the photo was fake, noting apparent inconsistencies in the shadows, conflicting body proportions, and a strange line across Oswald's chin suggesting the head may have been pasted into the photo.

In 1978 the Select Committee on Assassination of the House of Representatives commissioned a panel of photographic experts to study the photo. Their examination included microscopic analysis of the photo, as well as photogrammetric comparison of Oswald's face to other photos of him (including two other photos taken in his backyard). No evidence of tampering was found. The mysterious line across Oswald's chin was determined to be a water spot.

Ted Serios was a Chicago-area bellhop who claimed he could transfer his thoughts directly from his mind onto film. He called the process "thoughtography." The images were usually blurry but had recognizable objects in them such as buildings, cars, or even aircraft.

The process of creating a thoughtograph was highly theatrical. Serios would usually get extremely drunk. He would shout and wail and screw up his features. Then he would hold a small tube, which he called a "gismo," up against the lens of a polariod camera. When he felt a thoughtograph was ready to emerge, he would shout at the person behind the camera to trigger the shutter. He never handled the camera himself.

Serios attracted the attention of a psychiatrist named Jule Eisenbud who studied him extensively and became a firm believer in his powers. In 1967 Eisenbud published a book called The World of Ted Serios which brought Serios to a much wider audience. A 1967 article in Life also gained him enormous notoriety.

Serios produced hundreds of thoughtographs. Two of them are reproduced here. The top photo, taken in 1965, shows an unidentified building. The bottom one, taken in 1965, shows an unidentified street scene. Eisenbud claimed that Serios' eye could be seen mysteriously superimposed on top of the car.

Skeptics have dismissed Serios' powers as a fraud. James Randi argued that Serios could have created the thoughtographs by concealing a small lens with a photographic transparency attached to it inside the gismo. Randi was able to produce similar photographs in this way.

After 1967, Serios drifted into obscurity. He reportedly died in 2006.