[1] André Gide, The Counterfeiters (New York: Vintage, 1973), 331-32.

[2] Clement Greenberg, "Four Photographers," New York Review of Books, January 23, 1964.

[3] Roland Barthes, "The Photographic Message," in Image--Music--Text (Glasgow: Fontana, 1977), 16.

[4] Walter Benjamin, "A Short History of Photography," in Alan Trachtenberg (ed.), Classic Essays on Photography (New Haven: Leete's Island Books, 1980), 215.

[5] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus 2.141.

[6] John G. Bennett, "Depiction and Convention," The Monist 58:2 (April 1974): 259-69. For a critical discussion see Nicholas Wolterstorff, "The Bennett Theory," in Works and Worlds of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 270-79.

[7] In this I draw on the cogent summary offered by Lorraine Daston, "Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe," Critical Inquiry 18 (Autumn 1991): 93-124.

[8] Vicki Goldberg, The Power of Photography (New York: Abbeville, 1991), 19. Jocelyn Moorehouse's film Proof pushes this point to an ironic extreme: a blind man takes photographs, which must be described to him by somebody else, to prove that the external world exists just as he imagines it.

[9] The 1990 British Museum exhibition Fake? The Art of Deception contained an impressive array of such productions. See the catalogue, edited by Mark Jones.

[10] On acheiropoietoi in the Christian tradition, see Ewa Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth: History, Symbolism, and Structure of a "True" Image (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1991). Kuryluk observes: "In order to establish Christ, masses of potential converts had to be convinced of the existence of a unique Man-God. Material proofs of his presence on earth were highly desirable; photographs would have been extremely helpful. Thus were acheiropoietoi invented--traces, relics, and likenesses of the one and only `true' God."

[11] On construction and perpetuation of the POW/MIA myth, see H. Bruce Franklin, "The POW/MIA Myth," The Atlantic 268:6 (December 1991): 45-81.

[12] "The Cottingley Fairy Photographs," in Jones, Fake? The Art of Deception, 87-90.

[13] The story is recounted in Justin Kaplan, Walt Whitman: A Life (New York: Touchstone, 1986),250; in Esther Shephard, Walt Whitman's Pose (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938),250-52; and in Gay Wilson Allen, "The Iconography of Walt Whitman," in Edwin Haviland Miller (ed.), The Aesthetic Legacy of Walt Whitman: A Tribute to Gay Wilson Allen (New York: New York University Press, 1970), 134. See also the "Whitman Photographs" issue of Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 4:2/3 (Fall/Winter 1986-87). The entry on this photograph (p. 54) quotes Whitman: "Yes--that was an actual moth: the picture is substantially literal: we were good friends: I had quite the in-and-out of taming, or fraternizing with, some of the insects, animals." If you inspect a good print of the original negative through a magnifying glass, however, you can clearly see the wire loop fixing the cardboard wings to his forefinger.

[14] J. Black, "The Spirit-Photograph Fraud," Scientific American (October 1922): 224 - 25.

[15] Phil LoPiccolo, "What's Wrong with This Picture," Computer Graphics World (June 1991): 6-9.

[16] There is an extensive literature on counterfactual conditionals. See R. M. Chisolm, "The Contrary-to-Fact Conditional," Mind 55 (1946): 289-307; and Nelson Goodman, "The Problem of Counterfactual Conditionals," in Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (London, 1954).

[17] Numerous additional examples of politically motivated erasures from photographs are provided by Alain Jaubert in Making People Disappear: An Amazing Chronicle of Photographic Deception (McLean, VA: Pergamon-Brassey's International Defense Publishers, 1989).

[18] The original and manipulated versions of these images are reproduced by Jaubert, Making People Disappear.

[19] Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (London: The Architectural Press, 1927),27-33. For the story of these photographs see Stanislaus von Moos, Le Corbusier: Elements of a Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1979),46-47.

[20] See "Ethics: Report Airs Editors' Debate on Principles of Pixels," in The Electronic Times, a publication produced at a National Press Photographers Association workshop on electronic photojournalism held at Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, October 6, 1989.

[21] Vicki Goldberg, The Power of Photography, 89.

[22] G. S. Layard, The Headless Horseman (London, 1922).

[23] Charles Hamilton and Lloyd Ostendorf, Lincoln in Photographs: An Album of Every Known Pose (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), 272.

[24] Harold Holzer, Gabor S. Boritt, and Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Lincoln Image: Abraham Lincoln and the Popular Print (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1984), 68-69.

[25] Kathleen Collins, "Photography and Politics in Rome: The Edict of 1861 and the Scandalous Montages of 1861-62," History of Photography 9 (October-December 1985): 297.

[26] Donald E. English, Political Uses of Photography in the Third French Republic, 1871-1914 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1984), 33-34.

[27] "Criticism of Prince's Hairstyle Creates a Royal Row in Japan," The Boston Globe, Tuesday, June 18, 1991, 16.

[28] Stuart Klawans, "Colorization: Rose-Tinted Spectacles," in Mark Crispin Miller (ed.), Seeing Through Movies (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 152.

[29] David Wise, "The Felix Bloch Affair," The New York Times Magazine, May 13, 1990, 42.

[30] Harry J. Coleman, Give Us a Little Smile, Baby (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1943).

[31] Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley spoke for many when he said, "Our eyes did not deceive us. We saw what we saw and what we saw was a crime."

[32] For details of this story see Vicki Goldberg, The Power of Photography, 90-95.

[33] "Who's on First," Newsweek, January 16, 1989, 5253. The incident is discussed by the photographer, Douglas Kirkland, in Light Years: Three Decades Photographing among the Stars (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1989), and in Fred Ritchin, In Our Own Image (New York: Aperture, 1990), 8.

[34] Andy Grundberg, "Ask It No Questions: The Camera Can Lie," The New York Times, Sunday, August 12, 1990, Section 2, 1, 29.

[35] "Playing With Photographs," The New York Times, Wednesday, July 24, 1991, International Section, A6.

[36] See Ronald Sullivan, "Judge Rules Against Rapper in `Sampling' Case," The New York Times, Tuesday, December 17, 1991, B3; and Sheila Rule, "Record Companies Are Challenging `Sampling' in Rap," The New York Times, Tuesday, April 21, 1992, C13.

[37] Deborah Starr Seibel, "Splitting Image: Film Technology's Ability To Mix and Match Past and Present Divides Entertainment Industry," Chicago Tribune, Monday, December 30, 1991, Section 5, 1-3.

[38] Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968 [1928]). Propp, in fact, claimed that there were just thirty-one such "functions"--"the interdiction is violated," "the villain is defeated," and so on--in the Russian folktales that he studied.

[39] Weekly World News, March 24, 1992, 39.

[40] On Curtis's directorial interventions, see Vicki Goldberg, "Fiddling With History in a Cause That Seemed Just," The New York Times, Sunday, November 17, 1991, Arts & Leisure, 35, 42.

[41] On the relationship between rules and meaning in general, see Mary Douglas (ed.), Rules and Meanings: The Anthropology of Everyday Knowledge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973).

[42] The basic sources on speech acts are J. L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962); John Searle, Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); and John Searle, Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). For related work in literary theory, see Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1983),118-19; and Stanley Fish, "How To Do Things with Austin and Searle: Speech Act Theory and Literary Criticism," in Is There a Text in This Class (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). In Austin's pioneering exposition, a distinction is initially drawn between constatives that report events or states of affairs and performatives (such as questions and promises) that are used to do rather than to say something. But Austin then undermines the distinction and argues that reporting is a kind of doing.

[43] See Searle, "The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse," in Expression and Meaning, 58-75.

[44] Richard Christiansen, "In `JFK,' Stone Turns a Film into Flimflam," Chicago Tribune, Friday, December 20,1991, Section 5,1. Other critics made similar points, expressed in various modulations of outrage. Tom Wicker wrote in The New York Times that the film treats "matters that are wholly speculative as fact and truth, in effect rewriting history." Hugh Aynesworth of the Dallas Morning News worried that "People will think this movie is real." Newsweek shrilled on its cover, "The Twisted Truth of `JFK'-- Why Oliver Stone's New Movie Can't Be Trusted." Some of these critics developed a parallel line of attack, claiming that, while Stone might sincerely believe the account of the Kennedy assassinations that he was presenting, it was unwarranted speculation. They suggested, in effect, that Stone did not have the evidence that he was violating the preparatory rule of valid reporting. Daily Variety reported one uncontested fact: the grosses were good.

[45] See Searle, "A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts," in Expression and Meaning, 1-29.

[46] See, in this connection, Austin's discussion of the assertion "France is hexagonal" in How To Do Things with Words, 143. Austin says that this report is "good enough for a top-ranking general, perhaps, but not for a geographer."

[47] Speech acts can also misfire, and speech-act theorists have given considerable attention to this. See Austin on "infelicities" in How To Do Things with Words, 14-45.