When Bill Clinton shook Cuban leader Fidel Castro's hand at the United Nations, the New York Daily News was the only one of the city's major publications to capture the first-ever meeting between a sitting United States president and Castro.
There was only one catch -- the photo had never been taken.
Instead, the photo was actually a montage -- a composite photograph of two pictures that were combined to illustrate a moment that reporters had witnessed but photographers hadn't photographed.
Ever since the dawn of photography, people have manipulated images. But digital media has transformed the art of montage to create new fake realities. Scissors are no longer necessary. Now, artists can create cut-ups by simply pointing, clicking, cutting and pasting.
"The invention of the photomontage was part of a political imperative to democratize art," said David Palmer, an expert in the field. "Everybody could get access to newspapers and magazines, scissors and glue. It was art of the people, by the people, for the people."
Palmer's website, "Cut and Paste: History of Photomontage," chronicles the evolution of montage, from the Victorian era to the use of montage by Dada artists and the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s.
Today, montage has expanded to include text, sound and digital presentations using such graphics programs as Photoshop.
"Montage has taken another giant leap forward with the invention of digital image processing, and a new wave of democratization is beginning," Palmer said. "We are approaching an age of almost universal access to digital technology, and programs of previously unimaginable complexity are now widely available."
With Photoshop, problems of traditional cut-and-pasting are resolved. Colors can be adjusted to blend, unwanted elements can be erased and images can be made to fit any scale. Digital images are easily altered and reproduced, leaving original images untouched.
"Photoshop, and less expensive alternatives like Paint Shop Pro, are part of the everyday life of millions of people," Palmer said. "It is no longer just the big-budget studio that can engage in special effects. We can all be the director of our own movie."
Just as important as Photoshop to this revolution in digital montage is the spread of the Internet, which has provided a limitless supply of images for the taking.
The homegrown art of Photoshopping has inspired legions of amateurs to doctor images with photo-imaging software, such as the infamous Tourist Guy next to the World Trade Center and the Bert is Evil Muppet juxtaposed with images of Osama bin Laden.
Sites like Fark.com, b3ta.com and Worth1000.com host weekly Photoshop challenges.
The rise of digital montage raises the thorny perennial problem of copyright, "but that has been a difficult and contentious issue that has dogged photomontage since its inception," Palmer said.
Editing, or montage, is the key 20th century technology for creating fake realities, according to Lev Manovich, associate professor of New Media at the University of California at San Diego.
"Digital makes anything possible and also means that you can trust the media less nowadays," said Avi Muchnick, founder of Worth1000.com. "It's routine for people to question everything now. People (online) no longer take any images at face value because they are aware of digital media's tremendous potential for hoax."
"I think that younger generations who are now growing up with the technology to manipulate the imagery of the world are often much more aware of the fact that what they are seeing has been doctored," Palmer said.
When new techniques, such as electronic keying (combining two different image sources together), became standard television practice, the construction of moving images began to routinely rely on montage within a shot. TV news anchors could be placed in front of breaking news footage and pop stars could be placed in front of animations in a music video.
While old media relied on montage throughout the 20th century, new media substitutes what Manovich calls the "aesthetics of continuity," where elements of different media are placed next to each other "without any attempt to establish contrast, complementarity or dissonance between them."
Now, digital technology is used to create composite images that erase boundaries, rather than emphasizing differences.
"In computer culture, montage is no longer dominant aesthetics, as it was throughout the 20th century," Manovich writes in his book, The Language of New Media.
"If the general trajectory of computer culture is from 2-D images toward 3-D computer graphics representations, digital compositing represents an intermediary historical step between the two."
Digital compositing refers to the process of combining a number of moving-image sequences and possibly stills into a single sequence, with the help of compositing software such as Adobe's After Effects, Alias/Wavefront's Compositor or Kodak's Cineon. Rather than keying together images from two video sources, producers can composite a shot that may consist of unlimited image layers.
Today, virtually all special effects in film, computer games, virtual worlds and television use digital compositing to create moving images.
Live and 3-D virtual actors blend with a computer-rendered chip in the blockbuster Titanic, just as computer-generated dinosaurs blend with the landscape in Jurassic Park. The game Quake simulates a continuous trajectory through a 3-D world.
"Montage aims to create visual, stylistic, semantic and emotional dissonance between different elements," Manovich writes. "In contrast, compositing aims to blend them into a seamless whole, a single gestalt."
Digital technology has also created new challenges for designers and artists.
"The main problem is no longer how to generate convincingly looking individual images but how to blend them together," Manovich writes.
It remains to be seen whether computer culture will gradually abandon pure lens-based imaging, such as still photography, film and video, and replace it with composite images, and ultimately, 3-D computer-generated simulations.
"When and where moving 'streams' will be replaced by 100 percent 3-D computer generated scenes will depend not only on cultural acceptance of a computer scene's look, but also on economics," Manovich writes. "A 3-D scene is much more functional than a film or video shot of the same scene but, if it is to contain a similar level of detail, it may be much more expensive to generate."
Such digital technologies are testing traditional definitions of art.
"If something is so real that it can't be distinguished from the reality, then it's no longer art," Worth1000's Muchnick said. "That's the stage digital is heading ... no longer art in many ways, but not quite reality either."
Eventually, digital technology will "take over everything from oil paintings to cartoons and everything will be created entirely using software," Muchnick said. "We're going to see a new renaissance of online art created by people who could not have been artists when only traditional tools were available."
