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Digital Forensics: Photo Tampering Throughout History [Slide Show]
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November 1997: After 58 tourists were killed in a terrorist attack at the temple of the pharaoh Hatshepsut in Luxor, Egypt, the Swiss tabloid Blick digitally altered a puddle of water to appear as blood flowing from the temple.
September 1976: In the People's Republic of China, the so called "Gang of Four" were removed from this original photograph of a memorial ceremony for Mao Zedong held at Beijing's Tiananmen Square after they had fallen out of favor with the regime.
September 1971: The chancellor of West Germany, Willy Brandt [far left], meets with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev [far right], first secretary of the Communist Party. The two smoke and drink, and it is reported that the atmosphere is cordial—and also that they are drunk. German media publishes a photograph that shows the champagne bottles on the table. The Soviet press, however, removed the bottles from the original photograph.
1968: When in the summer of 1968 communist leader Fidel Castro [right] approved of the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia, Cuban writer and political activist Carlos Franqui [middle] cut off relations with the regime and went into exile in Italy. His image was subsequently removed from photographs.
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1942: In order to create a more heroic portrait of himself, Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini had the horse handler removed from the original photograph.
1937: In this doctored Nazi photograph, Adolf Hitler had Joseph Goebbels [second from right] removed from the original photograph. It remains unclear why Goebbels had fallen out of favor with Hitler.
1936: In this doctored photograph, Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong [first from the right] had Po Ku [first from the left] removed from the original photograph, after Po Ku fell out of favor with Mao.
Circa 1930: Soviet premier, Joseph Stalin, routinely airbrushed his enemies out of images. In this photo, a commissar was removed from the original photograph after falling out of favor with Stalin.
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Circa 1865: In this photo by famed photographer Mathew Brady, General William Tecumseh Sherman is seen posing with his generals. General Francis P. Blair [far right] was added to the original photograph.
Circa 1860: This nearly iconic portrait of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln is a composite of Lincoln's head and the body of Southern politician, John Calhoun. Putting the date of this photo into context, note that the first permanent photographic image was created in 1826 and the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company (later to become Eastman Kodak) was created in 1884.
