Word: composograph
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Mexican Cinemactress Dolores Del Rio, almost lifesize, in color. ¶A "composograph" (frankly doctored picture) of Gypsy Rose Lee. strip teaser, in conversation with Mrs. Harrison Williams, "world's best-dressed woman." Sample imaginary dialog: Williams: "I never wear the same thing twice. And you?" Lee: "I never put off tomorrow what I can put off today...
Last week Publisher Macfadden began to make up for lost time. Upon the front of his Graphic he spread a full page "composograph" (faked picture) of a young man in Sing Sing's electric chair. The young man was Francis ("Two Gun") Crowley, 20, undersized, dull-witted hoodlum who murdered a policeman last year. His capture was a sensation of the sort on which he thrived. Cornered in a midtown apartment house with his 17-year-old girl friend and another gunman, he held off more than 100 police, armed with tear gas and machine guns, for two hours...
...Graphic explained its "composograph" (a famed old Graphic device which had fallen into disuse during Publisher Macfadden's absence) in a subsequent issue: "It is a prison rule that no cameras are allowed in the execution chamber. The Graphic's editors would not wish to print the actual photograph of the execution in any event." But the Graphic's editors did their best to make the full-page picture look as much as possible like a repetition of the Daily News's exploit of printing an actual photograph of Ruth Snyder in the electric chair...
TIME reprinted the Daily News's composograph of Mahatma Hoover, not as news of the President of the U. S. but as a phenomenon of the U. S. Press...
Mechanically the picture was a variation of the "composograph" (faked picture) with which the Macfadden tabloid Evening Graphic used to sensationalize the news. "Composographs" are rarely used these days to simulate actual news photographs. The energy of news photographers and the license taken by tabloid editors make such devices unnecessary. When the trussed and battered body of Benjamin P. Collings was washed ashore on the sands of Long Island last week (see p. 17). News and Mirror obliged by printing large, close-up pictures of the muddy corpse as it lay on the beach. That put them one jump ahead...