Misleading Captions
(aka 'Real Picture, Fake Caption')

It's often said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Perhaps that's true, but it's also the case that just a few words can completely change the meaning of a picture.

A photograph and its caption should be regarded as a single unit because photographs are not self-explanatory (despite somewhat widely held perceptions to the contrary). They require captions to provide us with contextual information so that we can make sense of the photo — information such as where and when the photo was taken, or who the people are in it, or what's going on. Therefore, adding a false caption to a photo is a form of photo fakery, just as much as altering an image itself is.

False captions can provide otherwise unremarkable images with dramatic narratives, turning them into images that quickly go viral.

In a sense, every fake photo has a misleading caption. But the images in this gallery are ones in which the picture, in its original context, was 'real' — or, at least, not misleading — but became untruthful due to the addition of a false caption.