SOCIETY

THE PRACTICE of doctoring photographs can be a very wicked thing, as we shall see. But it can also be trivial. Many of us must wish that various pictures of us did not exist. That awful school photo from primary school, or other disastrous snaps from our early childhood.

Is it wicked for us to do what we can to keep other people from seeing them? The fashion desert of the 1970s, for instance, where countless couples were married, do not display their wedding photographs. And who can blame them?

And to the Royal Family. Many of us still have no idea what the Princess of Wales was up to in her recent family snapshot, and outrage should be far from our minds.

The public demands a lot of photographs of the Royal Family, and why not? Half its power comes from the fact that it is a family, rather than a gang, cabinet, or a board of directors.

But families, even Royal ones, are not always as cheerful, contented, or well behaved, as we wish they were. It would have been a cleverer thing not to have done whatever it was that they did.

Far worse, and much fishier, was the curious case of the Bullingdon Club images of David Cameron, Al “Boris” Johnson, and George Osborne, from their Oxford days.

David Cameron obviously detested these records of debauchery, not wanting the public to be reminded of his time in this alcohol-fuelled society of well-heeled brutes. Was it a mere coincidence that they were mysteriously withdrawn by the company which owned them in 2008, so newspapers had to stop using them?

As it happens, Coincidence Theory (the idea that things happen by accident far more often than by design) is often believable. But not in this instance.

Odd was the obviously doctored 1992 Bullingdon pictures, featuring, among others, George Osborne and his (now former) friend Nat Rothschild. At first glance, it appears normal, but look carefully, and you will see it is full of suspicious peculiarities.

To the left of the middle, there’s a mysterious gap where somebody ought to be standing but isn’t. Weirder still, there’s a patch of shirt-front and waistcoat there, with no person attached. The right trouser leg of Mr Rothschild has a white lapel on it, not usual even under the bizarre dress code of the Bullingdon.

On close examination, the three seated figures at the front appear to have been stuck in place after being moved from somewhere else.

But again, these are tiny things compared with the monstrous crimes which the truly powerful commit with photographs, when they can. In pre-internet days, they simply hacked up the old pictures and replaced them with new items. Only the tiny few with access to original archives could ever be sure that what they were seeing was true.

TWO

THOUSANDS of images of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, sometimes standing near the Soviet demi-god, Vladimir Lenin, were wiped from Soviet history books, magazines, newspapers, and encyclopaedias, after Trotsky fell from favour.

In 1997, David King chronicled the photographic murder of the past, in his book “The Commissar Vanishes”. And it was murder. Those whose pictures were removed usually became dead soon afterwards.

The most poignant story of this kind is told by Milan Kundera in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting. It concerns the Czech Communist Vladimir Clementis. Clementis was standing beside the Czech Communist leader, Klement Gottwald, at a huge public meeting in Prague to mark their takeover of the country. It was snowing heavily, so Clementis lent his fur hat to the bare-headed Gottwald. Pictures recorded the comradely scene.

But four years later Clementis was purged for having the wrong view of Marx. He was hanged, cremated, and abused still further after death on the streets of Prague in a most barbaric way. And he was wiped from the images of 1948, leaving only his hat behind.

THREE

WHO knows what a future totalitarian regime might do, with the limitless powers provided by modern technology? This cannot only erase the past but can, through deepfake methods, create a wholly different past so convincing that only those who were actually there would be sure it was not a lie.

If human gullibility is anything to go by, even eyewitnesses of the truth might eventually fall in with the new altered version.

This was prefigured, as are so many evils of today, in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The central character, Winston Smith, has the highly responsible job of cleaning up the paper archives of The Times, to make sure they do not clash with official lies. His discovery of a photograph, of three leaders of the ruling party – Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford – fills him with terror. Its obvious location and stated date show that official history is false.

He sends it swirling into the “memory hole” which leads to the great furnace where all inconvenient facts are burned to ashes.

But he is still not safe. What if someone else saw him as he looked at it? What if the surveillance cameras picked it up (as we learn later, they did)?

The mere fact that he has seen this picture puts him in danger. He knows what nobody should know. He can never forget it. He cannot unsee it. His actual existence is a peril to his totalitarian chiefs.

Orwell writes: “It was curious that the fact of having held it in his fingers seemed to him to make a difference even now, when the photograph itself, as well as the event it recorded, was only memory. Was the Party’s hold upon the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence which existed no longer had once existed?”

As it turns out, in the torture cellars of the Ministry of Love, Winston, amongst other humiliations of the mind, is compelled to affirm that the photograph never existed.

In the end, with tears in his eyes, he joins the great deceived multitudes who believe what the authorities tell them and who have no idea what the past was really like, even if – especially if – they lived through it.

It is that sort of thing, not a mildly doctored family snapshot trying to provide some cheer and happiness, that we need to be worrying about. Useful as it is to know that the technology exists to turn anyone with the right equipment into a potential liar and fraud, and to make us all open to monstrous deceit, of a kind that even Stalin never dreamed of.

The truth needs to be told.