Photo Fakery: The History and Techniques of Photographic Deception and Manipulation

Photographs constitute a major source of information about international affairs. This fascinating book, written by one of the founders of the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center, is a primer on how purveyors of that information manipulate or falsify it. Brugioni also unveils some of the techniques for detecting photo fraud, using a rich array of examples from the Cold War. In fact, this amply illustrated and amusing book's implications are rather somber: the advent of increasingly sophisticated and inexpensive computer tools for photo fakery means that even the experts will find themselves fooled.