The doctoring of photos (even down to airbrushing out the lamppost, or whatever it is) is WRONG. That’s all there is to it. There’s a whole book out about the doctoring-of photos during Stalin’s regime. People around Stalin were being purged and executed so often that they then had to be taken out of happy group photos from the past. Stalin and his men wanted to control the past as well as the present and future. “Oh no, no, no. Trotsky can’t be in the same picture as me. Trotsky is dead to me. The whole thing doesn’t work if Trotsky ever had anything to do with it. Take him out of the photo.”
I cannot state my position strongly enough. It is WRONG.
The photographer who did the doctoring was fired. GOOD.
