Oddity of the Week: Photoshopped!
Created | Updated Nov 2, 2014
Just how far back does fakery go? Is it maybe, the third oldest profession?
Photoshopped! (And outted by the Library of Congress)
See this picture from 1897? It shows a brave, intrepid exploring-type woman in a ravine, high in the Yukon Territory. North to Alaska, mush-mush. What a brave thing to do, explore the Klondike. Amazing photo, real front-page stuff.
Look closer. People in 1897 might not have been so critical, but you've seen a LOT of photoshopped pictures: Bigfoot, that giant hog, last week's UFOs, etc, etc. What's wrong with this picture? Well, if Esther Lyons, the, erm, actress in the photo, were really standing there, she'd be about 30 meters tall. Not feet, meters. We're kind of skeptical.
Esther Lyons dined out on her purported adventures in the Klondike for years. In fact, she gave lectures about them, and wrote reports in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly. That was a pretty mainstream publication. Nonetheless, she was never there, as far as historical researchers can tell. For one thing, the original plates of her Yukon pictures, taken by a man named Veazie Wilson (who was there), don't show Esther. For another, Esther Lyons was somewhere else at the time: the US Midwest, getting divorced from her salesman husband and appearing in a play on tour. So that settles that.
Funny, though, how much that you think is new and different is really old hat when it comes to deception, isn't it? Maybe, instead of 'ripped from the headlines', we should say, 'ripped from the history books'.
