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Palace in Paris, containing decorative art, ceramics,
weapons, goldsmith’s, tapestry and, among others, the
Nieuwerkerke’s collection. He gathered a hundred views
in an album untitled L’Art ancien. In spite of his inter-
est for art, Franck was above all a witness to the men
and the changes of his time. In 1866, he published an
Album contemporain contenant les biographies de 300
personnages de notre époque containing conventional
portraits. After the Paris Commune in 1871–1872, he
photographed the ruins of Paris and its surroundings.
In 1880, he sold his establishment at Chalot and
devoted himself to the manufacture of opaline plates
for slides. Ten years after, he retired in Asnières, 7, rue
Saint-Denis. He died 16 January 1906 at Asnières.
Laure Boyer
Publications
L’album contemporain contenant les biographies de 300 des per-
sonnages de notre époque, with Justin Callier, Paris, 1866.
L’Art ancien, Photographies des collections célèbres par Franck.
1ere partie: Exposition de l’Union Centrale des Beaux-Arts
appliqués à l’industrie, Musée rétrospectif, Paris, 1865.
FRAUDS AND FAKES
The initial celebration, by William Henry Fox Talbot
and others, of the superior “truth and fi delity” of pho-
tography gave way in the second half of the nineteenth
century to an increasing awareness of the potential
duplicity of photographic images and of photographic
operators. Starting in the 1860s, questions of fraud and
fakery emerged in relation to controversies and legal
cases involving spirit photography, and in response to
darkroom printing tricks that allowed photographers to
alter a fi gure’s setting or identity. Concerns about photo-
graphic deception followed advancements in techniques
such as double exposure, combination printing, and the
like. By the 1890s the notion that photographs cannot lie
was routinely dismissed in print. In 1889, one critic went
so far as to argue that, “in every case a photograph is but
a deceptive representation of the object photographed”
(Woodbury, 1898, 283). Similarly, in the context of
aesthetic debates about photographic manipulations by
the Pictorialists, Eduard Steichen wrote in 1903 that,
indeed, “every photograph is a fake from start to fi nish”
(Steichen, 1903,107).
In fact, the camera’s special ability to deceive had
been discussed as far back as Giambattista della Porta’s
sixteenth-century treatise on natural magic, in which he
recommended using a walk-in camera obscura (literally:
dark chamber) for presenting fantastic scenes for the
astonishment of viewers, who “cannot tell whether they
be true of delusions” (Porta, 1957, 364–365). Refram-
ing the issue of natural magic in the nineteenth century,
Scottish physicist Sir David Brewster amplifi ed upon
della Porta’s observation that the optical image was in
itself neither true nor false, but because it seemed true
offered an especially potent agent of deception; only
knowledge of the laws of Nature could enable one to test
and verify potentially misleading sense impressions.
Talbot’s 1844 The Pencil of Nature celebrated pho-
tography for its special grasp of “truth and reality,”
thus obscuring the ability of photographs to create false
impressions. But, as inadvertently demonstrated by the
example of Talbot’s own Scene in a Library (actually
shot out of doors in full sunlight), the circumstances
under which a given photograph was made might not
be immediately apparent in the image itself or in the
statements made about the image (Charlesworth, 1995,
214–215). From studio portraits with false tree swings to
Alexander Gardner’s notorious civil war images of the
“Rebel Sharpshooter” whose corpse has been rearranged
by the photographer, nineteenth-century photographers
frequently contrived aspects of the reality that they pic-
tured. A famous 1883 portrait of Walt Whitman showing
the poet with a butterfl y perched on his fi nger, subse-
quently used as the frontispiece for Leaves of Grass,
prompted skepticism during Whitman’s own lifetime; it
would seem that a cardboard butterfl y had been rigged
up for the occasion (Mitchell, 1992, 196).
Two of the most widely publicized cases of outright
photographic fraud involved spirit photographers, the
American William H. Mumler and Frenchman Édouard
Isidore Buguet, who purported to be able to capture
faint images of spirits along with living sitters on their
photographic plates. Mumler was arrested in New York
for fraud and larceny in 1869, but after a lengthy prelimi-
nary hearing, the case was dismissed, owing to the fact
that neither the truth nor the fraudulence of his images
could be proved beyond a doubt. But the widely re-
ported hearing, including a deposition by the celebrated
showman P.T. Barnum, raised public awareness of the
many techniques for manufacturing fake photographs.
The idea that photographs might provide questionable
or false evidence and so needed to be viewed with
skepticism thereby gained new currency (Leja, 2004,
57–58). In France, Buguet admitted to trickery and was
convicted of fraud in 1875, serving jail time based on
his discredited spirit photographs.
The technique for creating a ghostly apparition
through double exposure (“for the purpose of amuse-
ment”) had been laid out in Brewster’s 1856 treatise
on the Stereoscope, prior to the fi rst publicized spirit
photographs. In 1860, Oscar G. Rejlander used a double
exposure to create a ghostly visage in his Hard Times,
and, more important, had ambitiously elaborated on
the possibilities of combination printing in Two Ways
of Life of 1857. His OGR the Artist Introduces OGR the