Propaganda - Photo Editing in a Time Before Photoshop
March 1, 2006 · By Greg Farries
Think photo editing begin with the advent of modern computers and sophisticated (and complicated) editing software? Think again. Take a quick tour of the “Falsification of Photographs in Stalin’s Russia.”
Those dirty pinkos will to anything to warp reality.
My father actually has a very interesting item in his collection: the English-language edition of the Annual of the Soviet Union, 1950. I don’t think there is a photograph in it that isn’t heavily retouched - some that I’ve seen elsewhere with the “bushes” replaced by people, and of course, the pictures of Lenin and Stalin in their old age and not looking a day past 30. Hard to see what the point is, but constant lying eventually becomes pathological lying, and the regime of a paranoid sociopath would arguably never have the confidence to reveal any truth.