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   » » Wiki: Composograph
Tag Wiki 'Composograph'.
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composograph illustrating article exploiting the of 1926.]] Composograph refers to a forerunner method of photo manipulation and is a retouched photographic popularized by publisher and advocate Bernarr Macfadden in his New York Evening Graphic in 1924.

The Graphic was dubbed "The " by critics of the timeHunt, William R. Body Love: The Amazing Career of Bernarr Macfadden. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989: 135. and has been called "one of the low points in the history of American journalism".Yagoda, Ben. "The True Story of Bernarr Macfadden." American Heritage 33.1 (December 1981). Exploitative and mendacious, in its short life (it closed operations in 1932) the Graphic defined "tabloid journalism" and launched the careers of and , who developed the modern there. Film director worked for the Evening Graphic as a crime reporter.

"Composographic" images were literally cut and pasted together using images of the heads or faces of current celebrities, onto staged images created in Macfadden's in-house studio, often using newspaper staffers as . Composite photographs, or , had been used in the nineteenth century by such photographers as to capture indoor scenes that would not have been otherwise possible before the flashbulb was developed.

Macfadden used them to represent events that were inconvenient to photograph, particularly with the equipment of the day: private bedrooms and bathtubs, Rudolph Valentino's unsuccessful surgery, Valentino's funeral, and notably on March 17, 1927, a full-page image of Valentino meeting in heaven. One early faked photograph—that of Alice Jones Rhinelander baring her breast in court (part of the divorce trial)—is said to have boosted the Graphic's circulation by 100,000 copies.

Apart from their sensational subject matter, composographs have relevance as a historical reference point in the current debate over staged and doctored news photos. Some of the Graphic composographs have an unforgettable eerie visual impact. In a 1997 academic paper called "Staged, faked and mostly naked: Photographic innovations at the Evening Graphic, 1924–1932" AEJMC Archives - September 1997, week 3 (#11) and a shorter online essay, Radford University professor Bob Stepno points out that the Graphic was published before improvements in photojournalism technology and standards that made possible the photorealism of , Black Star and others during World War II.


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