The History
Joseph Stalin and Photoshop
As we continue to improve our technology, we are jeopardising our society photoshop and content manipulation. This idea of photoshop, however, is nothing new to us. As Joseph Stalin rose up to power during the year of 1929, he was in control of the Soviet Union. Over time, Stalin took many photos with other individuals, but as soon as they fell from his favour, they would be snipped, airbrushed, and erased from photographic evidence. An example would be Nikolai Yezhov. Yezhov was a secret police official who oversaw all of Stalin’s purges. For a while, he had worked at Stalin’s right hand, interrogating, falsely accusing, and ordering the execution of thousands of Communist Party Officials. Yezhov nonetheless had fallen out of favour in 1939. Yezhov was secretly denounced, arrested, tried in court, and executed. He was then photoshopped out of all photographic evidence by Stalin’s censors. Stalin knew the value of photographs in both the historical record and his use of mass media to influence so resulted in photoshop to hide his mishaps. The use of photoshop is still consistently being used to this day, but in our current world, new software has been developed around this same idea of photo manipulation with intent to improve it but instead creating a whole new set of worries for our generation.