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President Barack Obama reads his statement to photographers after making a televised statement on the death of Osama bin Laden from the East Room of the White House in Washington, Sunday, May 1, 2011.Pablo Martinez Monsivais

Barack Obama's late-night address to Americans this week, announcing the death of fugitive al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, may well have been the seminal public moment of his presidency. Yet the historic photograph of that moment, which graced dozens of newspaper front pages the next day, was a fake - a staged recreation.

Standing in the East Room, Mr. Obama read his prepared remarks from the teleprompter, then turned and walked away from the podium. No photographers were present - a ban aimed at ensuring that his speech was not interrupted by the disruptive whirr of camera shutters.

Only afterward, with the television cameras off, were photographers admitted - the President returning briefly to reenact part of his speech.

The ensuing photo thus became the latest addition to the voluminous archive of contrived images that masquerade as reality, although it faced competition from the gruesome shots purporting to represent Mr. bin Laden's dead body.

Photographers, of course, have been doctoring their work almost since the invention of the camera.

For example, a famous 1864 portrait of U.S. Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant leading his troops is, in fact, a composite of three separate shots: Gen. Grant's head; the horse and body another general; and Confederate prisoners captured in battle.

Since then, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and dozens of other leaders have routinely altered state photographs, either to reflect themselves more favourably or to erase the inconvenient presence of rivals. Last fall, the state-owned Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram rearranged a photograph to show then-president Hosni Mubarak walking ahead of President Obama, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, president Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and Jordan's King Abdullah II in the White House. In the original shot, Mr. Mubarak's position was near the rear.

To this day, photojournalists scrutinize official handouts from the governments of Iran and North Korea as they may a children's puzzle: what's wrong with this picture? Or, where's the lie?

The problem today, however, is that anyone with a camera can lie - and refashion reality for their own purposes. And they may not be caught. Modern digital technology allows amateurs and professionals to tinker with images, creatively manipulating shadow, colour, reflection and perspective.

For commercial and artistic photographers, it's an empowering arsenal. But for photojournalists, editors and their audiences, the pixel-based tool kit raises challenging issues.

In 1970, publishing one of the defining photographs of the anti-Vietnam War movement, Life Magazine editors removed an offending gatepost that appeared to rise from the head of Mary Ann Vecchio as she bent over the body of a student shot by the National Guard at Kent State University.

But where is the boundary between authenticity and fraud? How much artificial composition - a child's broken toy deftly added to a theatre-of-war shot, for example - can be sanctioned? Do photographs of a protest by political dissidents, staged expressly to gain publicity, still count as truth? Is it permissible for a photographer to merge the content of two good shots to create one great shot that may put him on Page One?

In the digital darkroom, when does conventional tweaking of a genuine photograph begin and when does it end? How much airbrushing - in men's and women's fashion magazines and elsewhere - should be tolerated?

If the image is published, what disclaimers should accompany it? (Most newspapers carrying the Obama speech photo included a caption acknowledging its after-the-fact status.) And how confident can news organizations be that any photo being published represents visual truth?

Some of these questions were brought forcefully home to Reuters during Israel's 2006 war with Hezbollah. Working under battlefield conditions, freelance Lebanese photographer Adnan Hajj deployed Photoshop tools to clone and dramatically darken plumes of smoke rising against the Beirut skyline - the aftermath of an aerial attack. Supporters of Israel denounced the fabrication, which exaggerated the extent of the bombardment and its damage.

After a storm of protest, Reuters quickly withdrew the offending shots from circulation, suspended Mr. Hajj, fired the photo editor responsible and tightened oversight processes to prevent a recurrence.

Mr. Hajj's manipulation was easy to spot, via the duplication of smoke patterns and buildings. More subtle inventions can sometimes be caught by software programs, which use sophisticated algorithms to analyze photographs for evidence of manufactured elements.

But that process is too time-consuming for organizations like Reuters, which handle up to 1,500 shots per day. Worse, the latest incarnations of Adobe's Photoshop now deliver optical tools powerful enough to "improve" almost any image in ways that would fool even seasoned photo editors. The rise of citizen photojournalism - JPEGs streaming in over the electronic transom, provenance unknown - adds yet another dimension.

The challenge is unlikely to get easier. The array of technological tricks is broadening and with it, the ability to manufacture reality. In that visual minefield, news organizations will be increasingly dependent on the integrity of their sources to convey the truth. And so will their readers.

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