The Harper's one bewilders me. One of the Marines is faded out, as if he were symbolically missing. That people would misconstrue that as "these pictured Marines are AWOL or deserters" worries me.
That one bugged me, too. Unlike all the other examples, that photo was manipulated to make it obvious that it was a "photo illustration". The only apparent controversy is the context in which the photo appeared. I found an article with more info:
It sounds like some of the marines and their parents are upset, but they don't have much recourse, since the marine base allows the press to photograph the troops without their permission. The one issue that might have been trouble for Harper's was, ironically, the obvious photo manipulation, which is forbidden in the terms of the stock photo license.
There's one nice story in a novel by Kundera in which in Czechoslovakia (60s ?) the dictator was giving a speech and as it started to snow someone from his entourage lent him his hat. Years later that person fell out of favor and was removed from photographs of that speech, only his hat survived on the dictator's head.
It does seem to have gone too much the other way though - magazines doing a complete hair-shirt act because somebody made a cover image which is obviously meant to be a cartoon ie adding the floor shadow to an election booth, or the highway signs to the politician's coat.
I agree in cases like the voting machine image, but most of the other examples (and the rampant attempts to pass off shopped images as real for political or other reasons) make me think it can never go very far, much less "too much" the other way.
It happened for millenia before that, people were chiseled out of Egyptian and Roman monuments by later rulers.
Paintings were also 'improved'. Washington didn't cross the Delaware standing up in an overcrowded boat striking a heroic pose while everybody else fended off icebergs - or at least if he did he was an idiot.
