Photo Manipulation

One of the most controversial and misleading forms of photography is Photo Manipulation- The editing of a photo to give it a different point of view. This is used for both entertainment and Journalism purposes in todays world, and what was once a difficult procedure to carry out, has became easy with the help of easily accessible Cameras and photo editing software. Some Photos can be merged, some can be edited by having items inserted or removed and some can be simply cropped. The use of any of these methods gives a whole new look on the photograph and the viewer can be manipulated to take a certain point of view, mainly with the use of cropping. An example of this is a photo of an italian earthquake, when certain parts are cut out we can come to believe that it is a War zone or perhaps just some demolished buildings, although this is not necesarily misleading it can lead the audience to focus on one main side and have a biased point of view. Probably one of the most famous cases of photo manipulation was Joseph Stalin's photos, whenever the man made an enemy of one his friends that appeared in a photo with him, he would have them executed and airbrushed out of the photograph, erasing them from history. The media uses some forms of photo manipulation to sell to the masses, for example a gossip magazine merged 2 photos together, one of Brad Pitt and the other of Angelina Jolie, in an attempt to mislead their readers.