About the work

A closer look.

Is this photo real? Was it edited, cropped, relabeled, or AI-altered before it reached you? Name one photo or one claim and I check it against the original. Send the question in your own words. Is this photo edited, is this image AI, is this a fake photo, where did this photo first appear, verify this image against the source. The work underneath is the same: the earliest version I can find, set beside the version you were shown. You get that earliest version, the specific differences (retouching, crops, removed or substituted people or objects, wrong captions, AI-generated additions), and every source I used, dated and linked. I work from the primary record: archives, library scans, catalog notes, the actual files. Not summaries, and not a guess from one look at the picture. If the record cannot settle it (a deepfake made last week leaves no trail in a 1950 archive), I say so plainly instead of padding. 48 hours. One revision included. Recent checks: the New York Times' own retouched prints of Lange's Migrant Mother, years before the negative itself was retouched; two 1863 Gettysburg plates of the same dead men, captioned as both Confederate and Union; a Stanford admissions banner with a student cut out and a generated face put in his place.