Hoax Museum Blog: Photos

Students hoax Paris Match — A pair of French students attending Strasbourg university won first place in Paris Match's photoreporting competition, a prize that came with €5000. But upon receiving the prize, they revealed that all their photos had been staged. From the British Journal of Photography:

Guillaume Chauvin and Rémi Hubert won for a reportage chronicling the harsh difficulties some poor students encounter while studying at the Strasbourg university. Their images showed students living in basements or offering sex to pay their rents. Another image portrayed a young man falling asleep in a bus as he embarked on a two-hour commute to his university. The reportage can be seen on Paris Match's website here.

The trick? All of the images had been faked, the two winners announced as they received the coveted prize on 24 June. ‘We though it was a bit caricatural,’ says one of the students to Le Monde newspaper. ‘We thought it would never win.’

Paris Match has now changed the rules of the competition to explicitly forbid fake reporting. You can see the photos here.
Posted: Fri Jun 26, 2009.   Comments (3)

Does Farrah Fawcett’s hair spell “SEX” in her famous poster? — In honor of Farrah Fawcett, let's revisit one of the major urban legends of the late 1970s: that the curls of Fawcett's hair, in her famous red-bathing-suit poster, spell out the word "SEX."

This legend arose to explain the incredible popularity of the poster, which sold over 12 million copies (by some accounts). It was always a bit of a mystery why that image in particular became such a focus of popular fixation. After all, there were plenty of other posters of scantily clad attractive young women. The subliminal seduction theory offered a seemingly plausible explanation. The poster was so popular, according to this theory, because the brains of young men were subconsciously perceiving the word "SEX" in her hair, and this triggered desire for the poster.

The word "SEX" is supposed to begin with the curls on her right shoulder that form an S. I can see the S, but I can't see an E-X.

Anyway, I don't think one needs to invoke subliminal seduction to explain the popularity of the poster. The combination of the smile and the nipples makes it an eye-catching image. And once it started to become popular, then the dynamics of group psychology kicked in, turning it into a fad.

Update: Thanks to Joel B1, I think I've now identified where the "EX" is supposed to be. For the benefit of those still unable to see it, I've highlighted the entire word in the relevant section of the image.
Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2009.   Comments (18)

More news from Iran — Catching up on all the stuff coming out of Iran in the wake of the election:

The Minister's Secret Letter
Photocopies of a letter allegedly from the Iranian minister of interior to Iran's Supreme Leader have been circulating throughout Iran. The letter discusses "your orders for Mr Ahmadinejad to be elected president," and states "for your information only, I am telling you the actual results." Supposedly, the actual results show that Ahmadinejad lost badly, getting only 5,698,417 votes, compared with 19,075,623 for Mousavi and 13,387,104 for Karroubi.

Assuming the election was fraudulent, this letter still doesn't seem plausible. Why would an official openly admit in a letter that the election was fixed? And as The Independent notes, "however incredible Mr Ahmadinejad's officially declared 63 per cent of the vote may have been, could he really – as a man who has immense support among the poor of Iran – have picked up only five-and-a-half million votes?"

The Photoshopped Crowd
The official state-run Iranian newspaper, Keyhannews, ran a picture of a crowd at a pro-Ahmadinejad rally. However, the picture appears to have been photoshopped to show a larger crowd than really was there. An image highlighting the cloned sections of the crowd has been circulating online. (PC Authority)


Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2009.   Comments (2)

Diversity, Toronto Style — Another case of cut-and-paste diversity. The city of Toronto wanted to feature a racially diverse assortment of people on the cover of its summer Fun Guide. Unable to find a photo that met that criteria, it created one via photoshop. The original is on the left, the altered cover on the right. (That's a really bad photoshop job.) The alteration was noticed by a graphics editor at the National Post.



The most famous case of cut-and-paste diversity was the cover of the 2001-2002 University of Wisconsin-Madison undergraduate application, mailed out to 50,000 prospective students, in which they inserted the head of a black guy into an all-white crowd scene. There was also the recent case of the asian guy photoshopped into the Homecoming Scotland poster.
Posted: Thu Jun 11, 2009.   Comments (8)


The Panama Women’s Cricket Team — The latest viral hoax photos circulating online claim to show shots of the Panama Women's Cricket Team. It doesn't take a degree in Photoshop to realize these women's buttocks have been digitally altered.

Fool Blogger has tracked down what appears to be one of the unaltered originals.

The Fakes:


The Real One:


What I don't know is whether this actually is the Panama Women's Cricket Team. A google search for "Panama Women's Cricket Team" simply brings up these photos.
Posted: Fri May 15, 2009.   Comments (28)

Saudis Censor Katy Perry — Blogger Susie Of Arabia reports that after buying a copy of Katy Perry's album One of the Boys in Saudi Arabia, she realized that all the pictures of Katy Perry had been heavily doctored by Saudi censors. Below (left) is the original album cover, and on the right is the Saudi version.

This is standard practice in Saudi Arabia. A few years ago I posted about Mariah Carey album covers that were similarly doctored by the Saudis.



Susie suggests that the Katy Perry albums were individually doctored by hand, by censors armed with magic markers. She writes: "the Saudi government is actually paying religious police members of the Committee for the Protection of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (CVPVP) to remove the plastic wrap from these CDs, open up the CD cases, remove the front and back inserts, and carefully and painstakingly color in with a marker any photos baring exposed female flesh that is deemed objectionable."

I really doubt that. It would take far too long. Instead, I'm almost certain that a more modest version of the cover would have been printed specifically for the Saudi market.

Of course, America has its own history of moral censorship of photos. However, in America the censors typically don't try to reclothe people who are wearing too few clothes. Instead, they remove offending details such as exposed nipples or belly buttons, creating anatomical mutants.
Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2009.   Comments (15)

New Lincoln Death Photos — After President Lincoln died, there was a huge demand for photos of him lying in his casket. However, the army didn't allow any photos to be taken. As a result, a lot of fake Lincoln death photos appeared. I've posted about this before, and I have an example of a fake Lincoln death photo in the Hoax Photo Database.

Mary Curtis just sent me an old newspaper clipping describing some Lincoln death photos owned by her grandmother. Unfortunately, no one knows where the photos are now. According to the clipping, she kept them "in a bank vault in a nearby town."

Actually, reading over the clipping, it's not clear to me whether Mary's grandmother owned photographs or "mourning pictures" (i.e. drawings). The first picture, showing Mrs. Lincoln kneeling before her husband, who is surrounded by his cabinet members, is clearly an illustration, not a photograph.



The second picture seems to be a photograph. The caption says that it shows Mrs. Lincoln standing in front of her husband's coffin. But is that really Mrs. Lincoln? And is she in front of a coffin? It's hard to tell from the quality of this copy.



A third picture is partially visible in the news clipping, but the clipping offers no details about it.
Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2009.   Comments (7)

Missing Women — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the rest of his new government posed for an official photo in Jerusalem on April 1. But when the photo appeared in the ultra-orthodox newspaper Yated Neeman, all the women had been digitally removed from the photo. Apparently ultra-orthodox Jews don't like the idea of women in politics and seem to believe that if they can't see them, then they don't exist. [Suomen Kuvalehti]
Posted: Mon Apr 06, 2009.   Comments (4)

Can you see Half Dome from the Central Valley? — This may be of interest only to Californians, but so be it...

On February 18 the Patterson Irrigator posted a picture that appeared to show the Half Dome in Yosemite, visible from Patterson. (It's a little hard to see, but if you look closely it's there.)



The thing is, Patterson is in the Central Valley, about 100 miles from Yosemite. So the photo met with a very skeptical reaction. A lot of people simply refused to believe that Half Dome could be seen from that far away.

There was discussion of it on the yosemite blog, and on fredmiranda.com. People contacted the photographer, who insisted the photo was real. And finally, photographer Tony Immoos decided to see for himself if Half Dome could be viewed from the Central Valley. He discovered that it could, and he posted the pictures on Flickr.

So that settles that question. On a clear day, you can see Half Dome from the Central Valley. (Thanks to Jack for the link)
Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009.   Comments (19)

Wolverine Blow-Up Doll — A picture of a Wolverine toy with an unfortunately positioned blow-up valve has been doing the rounds. It's another case of satire mistaken as news. The picture originated on the satire site christwire.org, under the headline "Marvel Now Promotes Gay Agenda With Wolverine Toy."

But once the image got loose on the web, its satirical origin was lost. Thus, the confusion.


Posted: Fri Mar 20, 2009.   Comments (11)

Bush and the Turkey — I received the following email about the photo in the Hoax Photo Database of Pres. Bush holding a "Trophy Turkey" during his 2003 Thanksgiving trip to Iraq:

you claim that the turkey George Bush is holding is plastic. This urban myth has been debunked a thousand times and yet still keeps resurfacing. Even the New York Times was forced to print a retraction of this myth back in 2004... If you want to maintain a reputation for accuracy I suggest you amend the caption accordingly. The turkey was real and not plastic.

Naturally wanting to maintain my "reputation for accuracy" I immediately looked into this. The New York Times did indeed print a retraction in 2004:

Correction: July 11, 2004, Sunday. An article last Sunday about surprises in politics referred incorrectly to the turkey carried by President Bush during his unannounced visit to American troops in Baghdad over Thanksgiving. It was real, not fake.

Unfortunately, what's missing in that retraction is an explanation of what evidence made them change their mind. Who did they interview? What's the source?

I figured someone must have dug deeper into the story and found someone who was there who could attest to the fact that the turkey was real, but all I could find was a lot of conservative sites linking to that one NYT retraction. Though in my search I did come across a Turkey Dinner George Bush doll on Amazon (plastic Bush holding a plastic turkey).

Eventually I took a closer look at the Washington Post article in which Mike Allen (who traveled to Baghdad with Bush on that trip) made the original allegation about the turkey, and that's where I found it:

In the most widely published image from his Thanksgiving day trip to Baghdad, the beaming president is wearing an Army workout jacket and surrounded by soldiers as he cradles a huge platter laden with a golden-brown turkey.
The bird is so perfect it looks as if it came from a food magazine, with bunches of grapes and other trimmings completing a Norman Rockwell image that evokes bounty and security in one of the most dangerous parts of the world.
But as a small sign of the many ways the White House maximized the impact of the 21/2-hour stop at the Baghdad airport, administration officials said yesterday that Bush picked up a decoration, not a serving plate.
Officials said they did not know the turkey would be there or that Bush would pick it up. A contractor had roasted and primped the turkey to adorn the buffet line, while the 600 soldiers were served from cafeteria-style steam trays, the officials said. They said the bird was not placed there in anticipation of Bush's stealthy visit, and military sources said a trophy turkey is a standard feature of holiday chow lines.

Allen notes that the turkey was a "decoration," but he also notes that it was "roasted and primped" (i.e. it was a real bird). Apparently a lot of people (including myself and the New York Times) focused on the word "decoration," not "roasted." In fact, I had to read that paragraph several times over before I noticed the word "roasted." Funny how the mind can make us ignore some details and focus on others. Must have been my liberal, anti-Bush bias clouding my judgement.

Anyway, I've now corrected the entry in the hoax photo database. Thanks to the correspondent for correcting that error.
Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2009.   Comments (31)

Krassner’s Anti-Communism Poster — In 1963 Paul Krassner included a poster that said "Fuck Communism" in his magazine The Realist. The poster was very popular with counter-culture types. Kurt Vonnegut described it as a "miracle of compressed intelligence nearly as admirable for potent simplicity, in my opinion, as Einstein's e=mc2" because it demonstrated "how preposterous it was for so many people to be responding to both words with such cockamamie Pavlovian fear and alarm."

Krassner himself often told this story about the poster:

At a midwestern college, one graduating student held up a FUCK COMMUNISM! poster as his class was posing for the yearbook photo. Campus officials found out and insisted that the word FUCK be air-brushed out. But then the poster would read COMMUNISM! So that was air-brushed out too, and the yearbook ended up publishing a class photo that showed this particular student holding up a blank poster. Very dada.

I wanted to add this yearbook photo to the Hoax Photo Database. I thought it would make a great addition, particularly to the Deleted Details category. However, I can't locate a copy of it anywhere, and I'm beginning to suspect it's existence is an urban legend. After all, why was Krassner so vague about the exact college?

I'd love to be proven wrong, but what I suspect happened is that someone held up a copy of the poster during graduation, and then people started to speculate about what campus officials would do if a picture of this stunt made it into the yearbook, and eventually this turned into what campus officials had done.
Posted: Thu Feb 05, 2009.   Comments (6)

Eating the world’s hottest pepper — This has to be fake. If he really did eat the Bhut Jolokia, the world's hottest pepper, he wouldn't be talking by the end of the video. His tongue would be too blistered and swollen. Still, it's a good video. (via J-Walk)


Posted: Tue Jan 13, 2009.   Comments (27)

Is “Where the Hell is Matt” a hoax? — Time magazine listed the Where The Hell Is Matt? video (which shows Matt Harding doing an odd little dance in various locations around the world) as the #1 viral video of 2008. But at a conference on December 11, Harding confessed that the video was just a hoax. He said the whole thing had been shot in front of a green screen, and that animatronic mannequins had been used to make it look like people were dancing with him. Check out the full video of his confession:



Now, when I watch this, I think it's obvious he's being sarcastic. He's making fun of people who are so paranoid they think everything is fake.

However, not everyone seems to recognize the sarcasm. I've run across some websites in the past few days that are reporting Harding's "confession" as a straight story, with no mention of sarcasm. For instance, check out this Associated Content article, which doesn't seem to be just playing along with the gag.

As the saying goes, "we are at our most gullible, when we are most skeptical."
Posted: Wed Jan 07, 2009.   Comments (13)

The Airbrushed Asian — When Scottish tourism officials first unveiled the promotional poster for next year's Homecoming Scotland campaign (whose purpose is to get people of Scottish descent to visit the homeland), people looked at it and remarked, "You know, not everyone in Scotland is white."

So a second version of the poster was sneaked out, with one small change: an Asian guy had been photoshopped in. (He's on the left side of the bottom image).

But most people seem to think the change is even worse than the original, calling it "tokenism" and blasting the government tourism agency for having to "think about it after the event."




The most famous case of cut-and-paste diversity was the cover of UW Madison's 2001-2002 undergraduate application.
Posted: Mon Dec 22, 2008.   Comments (10)

Adobe on Facebook — Each week Adobe -- the creator of Photoshop -- will give you five images to test if you can differentiate between the real and the fake. I got them all right! WooHoo!
Posted: Mon Dec 08, 2008.   Comments (3)

The strongest man in the world — Here's an entertaining example of complete bs. An Arabic TV station interviews a man who claims to be the "Incredible Hulk" of Egypt. He says that he has the strength of 30,000 men! He never sleeps! He has sex 15 times a day with his four wives! And he's so strong that the government doesn't allow him to work, for fear that he might accidentally hurt someone.

But the only evidence of his strength that he offers is his ability to tear a coin in half. This, of course, is a well-known magic trick.


Posted: Tue Dec 02, 2008.   Comments (7)

The case of the inserted belly button — I've heard of photo editors airbrushing out navels on swimsuit models (see the case of the vanishing belly button from 1964), but I hadn't heard of navels being inserted into photos. But that appears to be the case with Victoria's Secret model Karolina Kurkova.

Fashion watchers have recently noticed that Kurkova doesn't appear to have a full belly button. Instead she only has a "smooth dimple". Wikipedia speculates that the lack of a belly button is due to an abdominal operation in infancy. Nevertheless, in some photos she sports a full belly button, which means that photo editors must be creating one for her.

Or maybe it's all just an effect of different lighting conditions, and the debate is an excuse to examine photos of her. (via collegeotr.com)

Below: with belly button (left), without belly button (right).



Update: Some more photos of her via underwearqueen. Again, with belly button (left), and without (right).


Posted: Tue Nov 18, 2008.   Comments (13)

Ahmadinejad’s Wife — This photograph, which supposedly shows Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his wife, has been circulating online for a few months. It's often linked to with teasing, tongue-in-cheek phrases such as "Ahmadinejad's wife is a hottie!" or "Ahmadinejad's wife is hotter than Palin!"

But is the image real? Is that really his wife? If so, why and when did Ahmadinejad pose for the photo? It hasn't been easy to find any answers to these questions.

One source claims the image came from the German magazine Bild, though I can't find any confirmation of this. Instead, I think the source might have been the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet, though I have no idea what the text accompanying the picture says, and Google doesn't offer Turkish to English translation.

The only other pictures of Ahmadinejad's wife that I could find were taken when she accompanied him on a state visit to Kuala Lumpur in 2006. They were posted on IranFocus.com:






IranFocus also provides this small piece of info about Iran's First Lady:
Iranians have hardly caught a glimpse of Mrs. Ahmadinejad, and her first and maiden names rigorously resisted exposure after an hour of determined Googling in Persian and English. In the President’s official biography and website, there is no reference to Mr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad being married, let alone to his wife. One ultraconservative website reports in Persian that the President married a mechanical engineering student in Tehran’s University of Science and Technology in 1980, when he was 24 - you would have to guess her age - and that he has three children.

The woman in the top picture and the Kuala Lumpur pictures does seem to be the same, though it's interesting that she's showing more of her face in the Kuala Lumpur photos. So I'm going to say that the photo of Ahmadinejad and his wife is real. However, I still have no idea when the photo was taken or why.
Posted: Tue Nov 11, 2008.   Comments (17)

Kim Jong-Il’s Shadow — A recently released photograph of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il was supposed to prove that he's alive and well. Instead, it's raising even more suspicions about his health because the photo seems to be doctored. As the Times Online notes:

While the legs of his soldiers cast a shadow at a sharp angle, the shadow of the “Dear Leader” is dead straight. In addition, there is a black line running horizontally behind the soldiers’ legs, but it mysteriously disappears behind Mr Kim.

The lack of the black line behind Kim Jong-Il is what confuses me. Why would it have been deleted? The shadow of the soldier to his left falls across that section of the step, and yet it falls at the angle one would expect. If that section of the step was deleted, the photo forgers must have recreated the shadow of the soldier. But it's strange they would have placed the shadow of the soldier at a correct angle and screwed up the Dear Leader's shadow. So perhaps that's how the step behind him really looks. (Thanks, Hudson!)




Posted: Fri Nov 07, 2008.   Comments (19)

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