Are hoax photographs harmless fun or harmful propaganda? Peter Dench has a rummage around the history of hoax photography to find out more
What is a hoax photograph? What are they for, why are they done and what is the point of them? Can there be a legitimate place in photography for hoax pictures? Is a hoax photograph harmless, when does it become cheating and can it be a criminal act? I have questions. Writing for this magazine I’ve come across various hoaxes. Who can forget Jonas Bendiksen’s extraordinary The Book of Veles, that hoodwinked the industry into thinking his documentary photographs of people from the eponymous town were legitimate? Researching for an article on ethics in wildlife photography, I came across photos of a frog riding a beetle, a snail riding a frog riding a turtle and five frogs riding a crocodile. These seemingly cute and funny hoax images were often cruel or deadly with subjects being glued, clamped, taped, wired, refrigerated, shaken or killed before being positioned for a photo. In 2010 the Wildlife Photographer of the Year winner, José Luis Rodriguez, was stripped of his prize after judges found he was likely to have hired a tame Iberian wolf to stage the image. In 2016 a winning entry by Marcio Cabral was disqualified for featuring a stuffed anteater after it was decided it was ‘highly likely’ a taxidermy specimen. Aren’t these just highlevel hoaxes? If they were NFTs I’d gamble they’d prove collectable.
Writing about the ‘Golden Age’ of photojournalism and iconic British weekly magazine Picture Post, rumours persist that the darling of the magazine, Bill Brandt, was often liberal with the truth, using his family in some of his photographs dressed as East End gangsters. The controversy surrounding Robert Capa’s photograph of a falling soldier rumbles on with one determined academic, José Manuel Susperregui, saying he has definitive proof that Capa’s legendary Spanish Civil War photograph was a fake.
One of the first recognised documentarians of war, Roger Fenton, probably staged his image, ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Death’, (see left) moving cannonballs from the ditch onto the road in order to create a more dramatic image. Are these hoaxes or just using your nous to illustrate a story on deadline?
History
The definition of hoax is: something intended to deceive, hoodwink or defraud. Type ‘hoax’ into Thesaurus and you get: bamboozle, bluff, con, deceive, delude, dupe, fleece and fool, among others. Type in ‘fake’ and hoax isn’t an option. Hoaxes in photography are as old as photography. According to the Guinness World Records, the first hoax photograph was: ‘Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man’ (1840) by the Frenc
