Part one of “Bamboozling Ourselves” in the New York Times promises to be about the Nazi-era Vermeer forgeries. Peter Schjeldahl looked at some recent books about this October in a New Yorker article called Dutch Masters and it’s a fascinating topic, almost Indiana Jones-esque the way the art and politics come together.
I was mesmerized by Errol Morris’ last series back in March, Who’s Father Was He?, about the history behind a Civil War photo that launched a famous orphanage. In September 2007 the NYTimes published Which Came First?, an investigation into a famous battle photograph from the Crimean War. You quickly learn there’s a lot more to Morris’ pieces than simply reverse-engineering proto-Photoshopping picture tampering.
