Hoax Museum Blog: Photos

Seriously Richview Collegiate — A picture of a letter detailing a blatantly racist policy supposedly adopted by a Toronto-area high school, Richview Collegiate Institute, was all over Twitter recently. The letter reads:




Of course, the letter is fake. The school doesn't yet know who created it, but students are being interviewed to track down the culprit. Parents have been warned about the hoax. A school trustee commented, "Whereas 30 years ago, someone might have done something stupid like this and made 30 copies and distributed them, now it gets on Twitter and it goes all over." [thestar.com]

The hoax letter echoed the "Seriously McDonalds" hoax (below... so named because that's how the image was usually captioned) that went viral back in June 2011.

Photoshopped Greek Mugshots — Over in Greece there's uproar over some mugshots of suspected bank robbers. Photos of the men being taken into custody show them badly bruised, but in the mugshots released by the police these bruises have disappeared, and the police admit that, yeah, they photoshopped the mugshots to remove the bruises. Critics say this was done to hide evidence of police brutality. The police say they did it to make the men recognizable. In the photos below, the pre-mugshot pics are on the left, and the photoshopped mugshots on the right. [nbcnews]

Man prosecuted for photoshopping — Over in Zimbabwe they treat photoshopping as a serious offense, especially if you decide to photoshop your head onto the body of Robert Mugage, as graphic designer Ronald Chikambure allegedly did. The official charge against him was "undermining the authority of the President."

Apparently detectives were tipped off that Chikambure was displaying said photoshopped picture on the wall of his office, so they raided his office. They didn't find the picture on the wall, but they did find a copy of it on his laptop, and that was enough to land him in court.

Unfortunately, a copy of the photo in question doesn't seem to have been released. I guess they don't have the Smoking Gun over in Zimbabwe. [newzimbabwe.com]

The first (fake) photo from the Curiosity rover —
The first image (above) transmitted by the Curiosity rover from Mars was kind of blurry and unexciting. So the folks on Twitter and Tumblr substituted a more dramatic shot (below). It's circulating with the caption: "NASA just landed a rover on Mars, this is the very first picture. This JUST happened minutes ago."

It actually is a picture of Mars, but it was taken by the Mars Spirit rover in 2005. (link: gawker.com)

Orange Forest: real or photoshopped? —
Without knowing the context, I would have guessed this picture had been digitally manipulated in some way. But it turns out it wasn't. NPR explains:

The photo was taken by photographer Palindromo Meszaros.

Rachael Ray Cooks Her Family and Dog — For over a year, a picture of the Oct 2010 cover of Tails magazine has been circulating online. The image suggests that Rachael Rays practices cannibalism and eats dogs.


Of course, the cover is fake. The original cover included appropriately placed commas —"Rachael Ray finds inspiration in cooking, her family, and her dog."


I'm not entirely sure where the fake version of the cover first appeared. According to wlwt.com, Funny or Die was the original source. Though I can't find it there. But it was posted on Food Network Humor back in March 2011, and I suspect that may be the source from which it first went viral.

Tails magazine, fearing that many people were being led to believe that their editors were incompetent at grammar, recently posted an official statement to set the record straight:

The Great Loveland Potato Hoax: Was this the first viral fake photo ever? — Rick Padden of Loveland, Colorado has written a play about a famous hoax from his own town: The Great Loveland Potato Hoax. It'll be on stage at Loveland's Rialto Theater.

The Loveland Potato Hoax took place in 1895. It involved a potato farmer who created a fake photo of himself holding a giant potato. The photo started circulating around the country, passing from one person to another, until it eventually came to the attention of Scientific American, which published it, mistakenly presenting it to readers as a real photo. The farmer was subsequently flooded with inquiries from people who wanted pieces of the potato so they could grow their own giant spud.


The hoax is significant because the photo is quite possibly the first viral fake photo ever — predating by over 100 years such famous viral fake photos as Snowball the Monster Cat and Touristguy.

I can't think of any other photo that would possibly qualify as a viral fake photo before this one. There were definitely famous fake photos before 1895, such as the fake heroic photos of Abraham Lincoln. But they didn't circulate in a viral fashion. At least, not to my knowledge.

Anyway, I thought the hoax was worth adding to the hoax archive, so that's what I've done. The comment link is redirected there.

S?it Yourself —
This image that recently appeared on the May 4 cover of the Living section in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review is all over the blogosphere. Does the heading say "Suit Yourself" or "Shit Yourself"?

The real question is whether this was an innocent accident, or an artist's prank. Kind of like the penis on the Little Mermaid video cover. The artist swore he didn't put it there intentionally, but that was kind of hard to believe. After all, how could he miss it?

“Why Boys Need Parents!” Is this a photograph or a painting? —
This image (which appears on a lot of humor and weird picture sites around the web) is often captioned, "Why boys need parents." And try as I might, that's the only information I can find out about it. Where it came from and who created it, I have no idea.

I'm not even sure whether this is a photograph or a painting, though I suspect it's a painting. The low resolution makes it difficult to tell, and I can't find any higher-res copies. It's the boy's legs, in particular, that make me suspect it's a painting. They look slightly unrealistic.

So I'm posting this here in the hope that someone, at some point, might come along who knows something about the source of this image.

Update: Thanks to pazuzu for quickly identifying the source of this painting. (Yes, I was right. It's a painting!) It's an oil on canvas by Ron Francis titled "Skateboarding". Francis writes: "This image was inspired by a childhood memory. The suburb was somewhere around the north side of Sydney harbour and I was the boy on the skateboard."

Does this cat really have a cat-shaped mark on its back? — Several pictures of a cat with a cat-shaped mark on its back have circulated online for a couple of years.


There's also a version of the image with arabic writing on it, that's currently doing the rounds on facebook.


I don't know the cat's name, but the cat has a Japanese owner who keeps a blog, ameblo.jp/usousopp, devoted to posting pictures of it. There are hundreds of pictures of the cat up there. And here's the strange thing. In the two pictures of the cat that are circulating, the marking clearly resembles a cat. But in the pictures of the cat on the ameblo.jp blog, the marking looks slightly different. The pointy ears on the marking are gone, so the marking no longer looks as much like a cat. Though when viewed upside down, it resembles a question mark.


Perhaps the pointy-ear effect in the two photos was caused by the way the cat's skin folded. Or perhaps someone photoshopped the ears in. I'm not sure, though I'm leaning towards photoshop. I searched the site to see if I could find the pointy-ear-marking photos. (The site has an image browser feature which made searching pretty easy.) I wanted to see if the originals differed from the versions in circulation. But I couldn't find them on the site.

Cop Convention at Donutland —
I'm not sure how old this image is, but it must be 15 or 20 years old at least. It's been circulating online for as long as I can remember.

It's one of those images that's become a staple on humor sites, but people don't often pause to ask about the details of it: is the picture real? Where was it taken? And if it is real, what were all those cops doing there? Were they really all on a donut break?

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find out very much about the picture. Although I was able to locate where it was taken, because a few people recognized it. Both Jenni at ivman's blague and April at strangetalk.net independently identified it as a Donutland that used to be in Cedar Falls, Iowa. But the Donutland closed sometime during the 90s and was replaced by an Italian restaurant that also seems to have closed.

Some googling revealed that there was once a Donutland at 5312 University Ave in Cedar Falls. And here's that address now on Google Maps. The shot is from a different angle, and the Donutland sign is gone, but I think it definitely is the same building.


Jenni thought the police cars in the picture looked like they were from the nearby town of Waterloo, not Cedar Falls. She joked, "obviously Waterloo was suffering from a lack of security that day!"

April (writing in 2001) also recalled some trivia about the Donutland:


Because I can't see any obvious signs of photo manipulation in the picture, I'm going to assume the picture is real. Though why all the cops were there, I have no idea. Maybe it was staged as a joke. Or maybe all the cops really were on a donut break!

Does Autistic Photographer Patrick Notley exist? — Thanks to Smerk for posing this question in the forum. I thought it deserved to be on the front page.

Around about mid-2009, a slideshow began circulating via email featuring a series of stunning images, all of which had supposedly been taken by an autistic German photographer, Patrick Notley. The images were soon posted on slideshare, and then someone collected them together into a youtube video. A few examples of some of the photos attributed to him:


But Notley himself seemed to be a bit of a mystery. Despite being such an accomplished photographer, he didn't have a website. Nor did his name appear in any newspaper or magazine.

The mystery deepens if, as Accipiter has pointed out in the forum, you look closely in the corners of many of the photographs. There you'll see printed the names of other photographers: Detlef Winkelewski, Thomas Mörchen, Thomas Agit, etc.

Based on this, I think it's safe to conclude that Patrick Notley, photographer, doesn't exist. He seems to be nothing more than a compelling fiction invented by someone to make a series of nice photographs seem even more impressive.

But a little more research reveals that the earliest references to the Patrick-Notley slideshow don't actually describe Notley as the photographer. Instead, they had this message:


Notley isn't saying here that he took the photos. He's just saying he produced the slide show. That is, he chose the images. But as the slide show circulated around the internet, someone evidently decided it would be more interesting if he were the photographer. And that description stuck.

But if we accept that Patrick Notley isn't a photographer, is it safe to assume that he really exists (as an autistic person who likes to make slide shows)? I don't know. That's a lot harder to determine.

But it's worth noting that all the images seem to come from the same source, the German photography website fotocommunity.de. (This connection was first made over at proshowenthusiasts.com)

So if some guy named Patrick Notley did produce the slide show, he didn't have to work very hard to do so. He just cut-and-pasted everything together from one website. Perhaps he's both autistic and a little bit lazy.

The Case of the Leaping and Mating Giraffe —
When I first saw this image, I immediately wondered whether giraffes can jump. I did some googling and eventually found Giraffes by Nicole Helget in which she addresses this question:


Knowing that giraffes can jump then made me wonder whether the image could possibly be real — though it looks like the giraffe is leaping higher than five feet. But it didn't take me long to track down the source of the picture. It was created by "c_kick" as part of a giraffe-themed b3ta.com photoshop challenge. (It's also posted on c_kick's personal website, totalleh.com.)

But this is where the photo investigation got a bit strange, because in the course of tracking down the source of the image I found an older picture from which c_kick presumably cut-and-pasted the leaping giraffe. And this older image is more puzzling than the leaping giraffe one. It shows a giraffe that looks like it's trying to mate with a donkey.


The giraffes in the two pictures are definitely one and the same. That's easy to see when the two photos are placed side-by-side.


And the mating-giraffe picture is definitely older than the leaping-giraffe one, which c_kick created in July 2010. There are discussions of the mating-giraffe pic that date back to early 2008. Most of these "discussions" are along the lines of, "OMG Epic FAIL!!!!" But I did find one intelligent discussion of the picture posted by Darren Naish on the Tetrapod Zoology blog in November 2008.

Darren notes that attempted interspecies matings are far more common than people think, especially in captivity. But in the comments left on his post, people note that the giraffe in the picture appears to be a female. Therefore, it wouldn't be mating with the donkey. Though it might be a case of "assertive dominance" or "fake humping". But others are doubtful that the giraffe and donkey are even making contact, since the donkey seems strangely unconcerned about what's happening. Forced perspective could be making the two animals appear closer than they really were.

And finally, the question is raised of whether this mating-giraffe picture is even real. Is it photoshopped? Felicia asks: "Where the hell are the giraffe's front legs? It's not on its knees and the legs are not splayed - they point straight into the ground."

That's a good question. Where are the giraffe's front legs?

So it could be that both images featuring the giraffe are photoshopped. Though I'm not yet completely convinced the mating one is. I suspect that the angle of the shot could be hiding the giraffe's legs — for instance, if the ground on which the giraffe is standing slopes downward. To fully settle the question, one would need some kind of fancy forensic photo-analysis software, which I don't have.

So that's where my research into the leaping and mating giraffe ends. But while I'm on the subject of giraffes, here are some other fake giraffe pictures I found while browsing through giraffe images on google:

Driving into the mouth of the tunnel —
It would be cool if there really was a tunnel entrance somewhere in the world that looked like this. But this is one of those brought-to-you-by-photoshop images. The original is an image showing a billboard created in March 2007 by the Austrian ad agency Demner, Merlicek & Bergmann for the restaurant chain Oldtimer. (link: adsoftheworld.com)



What's puzzling me is whether the original image is itself photoshopped? Did this Oldtimer billboard ever exist in real life, or is the photo just a concept piece?

I can't find any pictures showing the Oldtimer billboard from a different angle. I can't find any sources that list the specific road where it was placed. Nor can I find news sources from 2007 that discuss the billboard. I also think it's strange that this was an Austrian campaign, and yet the writing is in English.

All of which make me suspect that the original image is a photoshopped concept piece. Though I'm not sure. It could be that I can't find any more info about the ad because all the info is in German.

Fast-Food Tattoo Guy —
The "Fast-Food Tattoo Guy" image has been floating around the internet since 2009, at least. It's not a very good fake. Which is to say, it doesn't appear that many people have been led to believe, on the basis of this photo, that some large, cheeseburger-loving man actually decided to tattoo himself with the logos of fast-food restaurants.

Nevertheless, I'm always curious about where these fake photos originally come from. In the case of this photo, I tracked down the original to a series of photos taken by photographer Philip Greenspun at the Newport Jazz Festival in 2005. He took several shots of this guy sitting on the beach, eating his food, and listening to the music. He titled them, "fat shirtless guy eating cheeseburger."

Greenspun seems to have an ongoing interest in taking pictures of overweight Americans eating. For instance, he has a series called Fat People Eating in Epcot. And here he describes why he's interested in photographing fat people eating:


I don't know who added the tattoos to Greenspun's Newport Jazz Fest picture.

Bouncing Bear —
This is one of those photos that looks so surreal you'd think it has to be photoshopped, but it's real. It was taken earlier today in Colorado. Although it looks like the bear might be bouncing on a trampoline, it's actually falling onto a thick mat:

Long-Tongue Girl — Exhibit A:


This image has been floating around the internet for quite a while. Over four years, I would guess, which is a lifetime in internet years.

I don't know why it caught my attention, but it did, and I decided to see if I could find any information about it. Or rather, although it's obvious the picture has been photoshopped, I was curious how much it had been altered.

I soon dug up a second (seemingly earlier) version of the picture. Exhibit B:



The girl's tongue is shorter here, but it's still very long. So is this the original photo? Or has it also been shopped? I don't know, but my suspicion is that it's the original. Which means the girl in the picture really does have a very long tongue. Who this girl is, I have no idea. But I wonder if she's aware that she's famous on the internet as 'long-tongue girl'?

The ghost of Janis Joplin attends a party — Posted by "klove614" on reddit: "Going through pictures from the other night...holy shit"



Reddit users quickly pointed out that the ghost in the background bears a strong resemblance to this poster of Janis Joplin:

Real or Fake: picture of Hindu man with knife sticking through his neck —
A picture taken by Reuters photographer Rupak De Chowdhuri. The Reuters caption states:

The options are:

1. This guy really does have a large knife sticking through his neck. In which case, he must have been in pretty bad shape whenever he pulled the knife out.
2. It's one of those fake magician's prop knives.

I don't have a definitive answer, but given that the knife coming out of his neck is bent at a different angle than the knife going into his neck, I think fake' is the correct answer.

Setting The Clock Back — A nice example of the forced perspective illusion. Photo taken October 28, 1960. (found on eBay)