Fake Photos

Fake Photos

I posted this photo yesterday for the 4th of July, because of the flag in the background, of a diver at a swim meet at Berea College, Kentucky.  Unfortunately, as reader Bigbilly pointed out, the photo is a fake: it has been Photoshopped.

Here's the original photo.  It was taken by LIFE photographer Joe Scherschel for a photo set called "Ohio State Swim Meeting" taken on March 30, 1953.  Not only was the photo faked by removing the swimsuit, the other information about the photo was fake, too.  The swim meet was not at Berea College, Kentucky; it was at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.

Unfortunately, fake photos like this can contribute to the spread of fake history: a distorted or outright false view of what happened in the past.  It is true that men and boys used to swim naked together in high school and college and the YMCA when there were no women or girls present.  However, the narrative has been spread that there were also some naked swim meets with women present.

Bigbilly belongs to a group that has exhaustively researched those claims, and they have found them all to be false, with only a couple of possible exceptions, and those were outdoor long-distance swimming marathons, not regular swim meets, and even in those cases, participants covered their genitals from spectators until they were in the water.

What do we learn from this?  Surprise, surprise, not everything you see on the Internet is true.

This isn't the first time I've encountered fake nude photos on the Internet.  The photo above claimed to be from the yearbook of New Trier High School, New Trier, Illinois.  Note the photos of the swim team and swimmers, even showing frontal nudity.  Would a high school yearbook publish such photos?

No, they wouldn't and didn't.  Here's the original yearbook page, with everyone wearing a swimsuit.

What makes that faked yearbook page extremely ironic is that students at New Trier High School actually did swim naked, and we have a photo to prove it, taken by LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt.  The caption says the students are warming up for water volleyball.  This would have been a boys' gym class with no girls present.  The photo above was published in the Oct. 16, 1950 issue of LIFE magazine and is definitely not a fake.  LIFE sometimes published photos of rear nudity, but it never published frontal nudity, and neither would a yearbook.

Here's another faked yearbook photo, from the yearbook of Clarion State College in Clarion, Pennsylvania.

And here's the real yearbook page.

Why do people create these fakes?  Just for the hell of it, I guess, and because Photoshop makes it easy to do.

But, again, the irony is that it's not necessary to make fake photos of nude swimmers when there are plenty of real ones around.  Above is a photo taken in 1938 by LIFE photographer William Vandivert of Michigan State swimming coach Matt Mann talking to a swimmer.

In 1937, LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt did a photo set on Yale University swimmers.  Here are the Yale boys in the shower.

And even the coaches had no need for modesty when in an all-male environment.  This is Eisenstaedt's photo of Yale swim coach Bob Kiphuth.  This and the previous two photos were never published in LIFE magazine, but the LIFE archive of 4 million photos taken by LIFE photographers is now available online for us to view, including some gems like the ones above.