Category: Imagining Disaster

Circulating online since early 2008
“Not What You Want To See”
Two pictures were composited together to create this dramatic scene.
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Appeared online in early January 2005
Tsunami Seen From a High-Rise
This photo supposedly showed a scene from the devastating Asian tsunami of December 2004, but the city in the picture is Antofagasta, Chile.
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Found online in late August 2003
The Great Blackout of 2003
This fake photo circulated widely in the days following the Great Blackout of 2003.
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April 2003
Louis Vuitton Designer SARS Mask
The fashion designer never actually included a SARS mask in any of its collections.
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2003
Shuttle Columbia Explosion Photos
When the space shuttle Columbia exploded upon re-entry on February 1, 2003, no cameras recorded the event. But online, a dramatic series of images of a space shuttle exploding began to circulate. They were said to have been taken "from an Israeli satellite in space." The pictures were actually screenshots from the opening scene of the movie Armageddon (1998), in which the space shuttle Atlantis is struck by meteorite fragments.
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Circulating online since September 2001.
Tourist Guy
Created by a Hungarian man as a bit of dark humor to share with his friends, this photo became one of the most widely viewed images online in the weeks after 9/11.
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