“Photographic fakery and fraud are as old as photography itself. The camera flutters away in clicks of a second and hails to all who’ll listen that it has captured its irrefutable truth. Our lives lived in front of our lenses forever enlightened in pixels and pages. Traces of long dead people stare eternally back at us through silver and light. Yet they are merely ghosts of the camera, nothing more than momentary shadows echoed and etched in print. Two-dimensional silhouettes concealing our real, temporal, three-dimensional lives.
This picture is an homage, in part, to Hippolyte Bayard and his Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man, aka La Noyée, made in 1840. Bayard’s picture is recognised as being the first ‘fake’ photograph ever made. It was produced only a few short years after the advent of photography, out of frustration from a lack of credit for his pioneering work in the invention of photography. In many ways, not much has changed. Only now we are drowned by a daily barrage of fake, manipulated and un-credited imagery. So what more can a photographer do but embrace these shadowy, ghostly half-truths of fanciful memory?”
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