Deliberately damaged photos

[Zaphod99]

I've never understood the current obsession with removing unwanted people (ex-wives etc) from photos. I've got two real, old, photos where someone attempted this.  One has just been torn in half leaving me puzzled as to who was standing next to an ancestor. On the other one, someone has 'almost carefully' performed a 'face-ectomy' leaving a strange zombie in a group photo. Am I alone in having deliberately disfigured photos?

Zaph

[Kiltpin]

Hi Zaph,   

Same, but different. I have a photograph of my grandfather on the day he first went into long trousers. The thing is, he is standing (to show off the trousers) next to a smallish dining type table. There is a cloth covering the table, but it is on the bias - that is to say, the points are between the legs rather than at the corners.   

The picture has been cut just past the front corner, so it is easy to work out roughly how large the table was. If he had been standing there on the far left, with a great empty expanse to the right it would have looked very unbalanced. So, logically there must have been a second person in the picture, on the right.

This would have been in India, pre-1900. Photography was expensive then, so it was not unknown for two total strangers to share a photo - two for the cost of one! 

Regards 

Chas

[Familysearch]

My grandmother removed herself from every family photograph at one time.  Just as well, other members of the family had copies!!

FS

[Gadget]

I painted many of the our holiday snaps when I was little.

I later learnt how to use Photoshop 

I didn't deliberately damage them - I was enhancing them!

[philipsearching]

My grandmother strongly disapproved of her father's friends, so she carefully cut him out of a group photograph and binned his mates.

[Stanwix England]

I suppose it's catharsis for some people, getting rid of bad memories or even a way of changing the past in some little way even if you can't change it in reality.

[Top-of-the-hill]

  I have made a point with my own photos of keeping ones with my daughter's ex-husband in them. She may not want to see them but they are part of her children's story.
   I have a picture taken at a family wedding which has had someone added! My mother looked at it and realised it included virtually all our nearer family except one of my cousins, so she cut her out of another picture and added her.

[Ruskie]

I have a photo of my grandmother with four younger siblings, which looks to have been taken around 1903ish.  It has obviously been cut from a larger photo as I can just make out some parts of adults clothing behind the children. I presume it is the children’s parents. 

[aghadowey]

One of our family photos was taken outside their shop but neighbour's child must have wandered into the picture so someone took a pen and hatched out the face.

There's another family photo of my great-grandparents with their 10 children. It was taken a few years after the mother died but the photographer has added her face neck & shoulders at the back so that the family is complete.