This article could be alternatively titled ‘yes the camera can lie and has done so for at least a century’ and the image that you’d use to illustrate it would be this famous if macabre image from Henry Peach Robinson.

Fading Away is probably Henry Peach-Robinson’s most famous work. It shows the dying moments of a young girl surrounded by family. Such subjects which may seem odd to us were relatively normative for the Victorians and this picture fits in with both the culture of the time and the pictorialistic photographic fashions of the time. It was however accused at the time of its creation playing on sentiment and was quite controversial.

The reason that this image could be seen as an example of the camera or photography being able to lie is this: Henry Peach Robinson was a great pictoralist but he began to find limitations with purely ‘in camera’ photography and started to experiment with combination prints. Peach-Robinson combined multiple negatives in order to make a print of a subject that may have been difficult if not impossible to either photograph in one take or was out of the range of the photographic technology of the time. This image and those like it by both Peach-Robinson and other similar photographers show us that creating images that look real but which are not is hardly a new thing. When people say an image has been Photoshopped they may be under the false impression that such image manipulation is a recent innovation but ‘Fading Away’ shows that it is not.

To create ‘Fading Away’ Peach-Robinson combined five separate negatives in order to create what he saw as an asthetically pleasing rendition of a young girl dying from tuberculosis, a common and horrible way to die in Victorian Britain. Whether you like the subject matter of the image or not, it still counts as an amazing technical achievement of the photographic art especially for the time. I may not like the subject or the sentiments behind it I do however admire elements of the composition such as the placement of the figures and the ability of Peach-Robinson to see beyond merely what the camera was showing in its focussing screen.

This image is pure ‘shop, although created 130 years before the Photoshop computer programme was created. Love it or hate it, ‘Fading Away’ is one of those seminal images in the history of photography.

Link

You can find more information about Henry Peach-Robinson and his work via the link below

http://www.mpritchard.com/photohistory/history/robinson.htm

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