"Long Before There Was 'Fake News,' There Were 'Fake Photos'"

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"The whole thing is staged — as are several of the exhibit's images. The photos were taken in the 19th and early 20th centuries, roughly the first 75 years of photography. This was also a time of rising European colonial power. European empires needed justification for subjugating vast swaths of earth, and photography could frame the Arab and Asian world in a way that supported the empire, says Ali Behdad, a professor of literature at UCLA and author of Camera Orientalis: Reflections on Photography of the Middle East...

The idea of using photos to make a political statement, meanwhile, continues to this day. In the Middle East, Behdad says, news and contemporary photography often depicts Arabs as "terrorists, people who oppress their women. That perpetuates the kinds of policies of exclusion that we see in Europe, Holland, France and the United States now. It's about image. It's about perception.""

http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/02/05/513252650/long-before-there-was-fake-news-there-were-fake-photos?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20170205

And a lot of those old staged photos continue to be our perception.