They were hailed as the first Indian couple to conquer Mount Everest but this week a husband and wife from Pune were accused by fellow mountaineers of using software to manipulate images of themselves on the summit.
The pair claimed they reached the summit on 23 May, but some people have scrutinised photos of the ascent, pointing to inconsistencies, such as the way they appear to change clothes in different shots and that the shadow on the flag in the photo (below) does not match the time they claim to have reached the peak.
While the dispute continues – eight mountaineers have now lodged a complaint with the police – this is not the first time travellers may have used clever photography to deceive friends, family and the media back home: from a drunken night out ending in Syria, to a Kenyan woman who inserted herself (badly) into photos of China. We take a look at five recent examples of “travellers” making a mountain out of a molehill.
Lads night out ends in Syria
In June, three club reps managed to fool media organisations around the world – including the Mirror, the Mail and ITV – after claiming they had ended up in Syria after getting on the wrong boat for a dolphin-watching trip after a night out on Ayia Napa. “The last club closed at 7.30am so we just powered through to our 9am boat trip and ended up blagging our way on to the wrong boat,” they told the Mirror. The trio posted a photo of themselves looking bleary-eyed and confused in “Syria”, which we can only assume was still somewhere in Ayia Napa. Alex McCormick, 19, told BBC Newsbeat that they had posted it on Facebook hoping it would get picked up and LAD Bible took the bait: “I made the entire story up,” he said. “I was just typing it out as I was going along because the LAD Bible contacted me.”
Fake gap year
In 2014, Dutch graphic design student Zilla van den Born proved just how easy it is to manipulate people through social media when she spent five weeks hiding in her apartment while pretending to the world she was backpacking around south-east Asia. A combination of fake-tanning, software, fake Skype calls to her parents from a “Thai hotel” she had built in her home and donning a disguise every time she left the house meant even her close friends and family were fooled. Compare her before-and-after photos here. “We live in a visual culture in which mediated information and reality are intertwined,” she said in a statement. “What is reality?”
That *looks* terrifying
It is a stomach-churning shot: a tourist hanging from a rock, with what looks like a vast cliff drop below. In fact, the photo (and many like it) is taken at Pedra do Telegrafo, a popular photo opportunity spot in Rio de Janeiro, where tourists can pose as if they’re hanging on for dear life when in fact they are barely 10ft above a grassy plateau. The illusion has been mimicked by thousands of tourists but it was a shot of Luis Fernando Candela (not pictured) hanging upside down by his feet that went viral last December, tricking the public until the truth behind the shot was revealed. Other images taken at the rock include parents pretending to save their children and couples kissing as they swing from the edge.
Insta-road trip
Playing with similar ideas to Zilla van den Born’s, Vice journalist Gideon Jacobs embarked on a project earlier this year in which he posted photos to Instagram purporting to show a road trip across America. Using the hashtag #InstaRoadTrip2016, Jacobs spent two weeks reposting images that had already been shared and geotagged via the platform from the comfort of his home, with captions narrating meetings with and stories about people he had never met. Though if you read the captions you’d be able to tell that Jacobs wasn’t actually on the trip, the virtual road trip was constructed from the idealised shots we’ve come to expect from this kind of journey, and played with the function and purpose of photography in modern travel. “Somewhere along the line, photography went from a means of recording reality to a force that informs it,” he wrote in Vice. “Instead of living our lives and periodically capturing the Kodak moments as they occured, we began to manufacture them.”
A “trip” to China that caught the internet’s imagination
OK, not every faked-photo travel project is quite as slick as van den Born’s, or as conceptual as Jacobs’. In March, Kenyan woman Sevelyn Gat asked her friends to fake her into images that would show her on a dream trip to China. The photos were so bad (though admittedly quite sweet) that they went viral, leading to a hashtag #whereissevegatsnow in which members of the public pasted her into countless photographs. The story ended happily when Nairobi businessman Sam Gichuru raised enough money to send Sevelyn on a trip to China … for real.
