Assuming you were the only person on earth that had a computer and Photoshop, what kind of damage/havoc could you have created?
Just wondering, as back then I believe most people believed all photos were pretty much “real”. The old adage of “a picture is worth a 1000 words” seemed to be the norm back then. Hell, even today there are people who still believe the photos on the cover of supermarket tabloids, although most sane people might raise an eyebrow and think there might be some doctoring of said photos.
My guess is you could have taken a picture of your (guilty) client and Photoshoped it into a photo of people at a ball game when the crime was committed and passed it off in court? Or maybe some candid shot of sexual mischief with a photo of a local or national politician?
Basically, from the 30s to the 50s, Stalinist Russia doctored photos (often quite badly) to cover up their purges.
I have a feeling that sufficiently-clueful people (e.g. those who understand the process of making a photographic print, in other words any photographer back then) would understand that it was possible to doctor photographs. Now, making fake negatives would have been rather difficult.
About 1905, George Milius (???) did a video trick photography thing, so it would probably be before 1905 that somebody could be really fooled, methinks.
I remember reading about this scam by 10 and 16 year old cousins 1n 1917 which kind of demonstrated how gullible the general public was back then.
The Cottingley fairieswere a series of photos superimposed on photographs of the cousins. According to the article, in 1981 both women admitted that the photos were faked using cardboard cutouts, which is obvious to anyone with any sense of logic.
I assume you could just take a photo of the photoshopped photo to make a reasonable facsimile of a negative.
Sticking the head of a celebrity on a person in flagrante delicto would be really compelling to a person not jaded by years of photoshop and the internet.
More accurately, one of them eventually admitted to the fakery, while the other maintained even to her dying day that at least one of the photos was genuine.
