On Oct. 15, 1933, the U.S.S. Macon Navy airship sailed over the Bay Area to its new home inside the $5 million Hangar One at Moffett Field.
“Crowned with the gold of California’s sunshine, the sky queen’s arrival was a spectacular event, which turned hundreds of thousands of eyes skyward,” The Chronicle crowed the next day.
According to the front-page story, the 6.5 million-cubic-foot dirigible “loafed” over Monterey Bay and flew past the Santa Clara Valley on its way up the Peninsula. It circled San Francisco, then pointed south, drawing 30,000 spectators to see the flying aircraft carrier (which held four Sparrowhawk fighters) nose down to its dock in Sunnyvale.
But the Macon did not, apparently, cruise past the Chronicle building in downtown San Francisco with the United States flag flapping majestically in the foreground, as depicted in a photograph printed across four columns on The Chronicle’s front page the next day. Or if it did, we missed the shot.
Now, 90 years later, we know that image — which ran Oct. 16, 1933, under the headline “Sky Queen and Old Glory — Long May They Fly!” — was a fake.
I run The Chronicle’s Vault Instagram account, where we share photos from the paper’s vast archive. In January, I was posting a series of aviation-related images — including the 1968 Japan Air Lines flight that landed in San Francisco Bay and Amelia Earhart in Oakland before an around-the-world attempt — when I came across a photo of the U.S.S. Macon.
In the image, the airship hovers just above The Chronicle’s gothic clock tower, the words “U.S. Navy” clearly visible on its flank. An American flag ripples just so in the breeze, and the clock’s dial reads 1:27 p.m.
I remember pausing when I came across the shot in an 8-year-old blog post by former Chronicle librarian Bill Van Niekerken. It was arresting and graceful, a familiar view of our workplace made remarkable by the vehicle floating past.
An altered photograph appears to show the U.S.S. Macon Navy airship passing by the San Francisco Chronicle building in October of 1933. However, a cut out of the airship was added to the original print and the American flag (since wiped away) was drawn on, creating a fake image.
Photographers unknown/The ChronicleI posted the shot to Instagram and went to bed.
The next morning, the post had hundreds of likes and a growing chorus of comments:
“Why does the flag look like a painting?”
“The airship also has a border that looks rather scrapbook-ish.”
“[W]hat’s up with this picture?”
A few weeks later, Chronicle Culture Critic Peter Hartlaub and I ventured into the archive to see if we could find the image in question. We had almost called our expedition a bust when Peter pulled the yellowed, 90-year-old photograph out of a folder labeled “Military – US Navy – Airships”.
Sure enough, the clock had been doctored and the flag drawn on with what appeared to be liquid paper and ink. When we wiped off the print, only a ghostly shadow of the Stars and Stripes remained, alongside an empty flagpole.
The Macon, meanwhile, was glued to the background of the photo with a telltale ridge around its perimeter. When I pried up a corner to peek at the original image, nothing was underneath.
“I find it hard to believe that they would manufacture the photo,” said Van Niekerken, the former Chronicle librarian who has spent countless hours paging through the paper’s old editions and past prints. “It kind of stuns me that they got so creative.”
While total invention violated the norms of newspaper photography even a century ago, in previous eras, Chronicle photographers, layout artists and designers took liberties that would be ethically unthinkable today. They often used white or dark retouching fluid to paint over objects in the background, removing distracting elements so the main subject of the photo popped off the page.
Rather than deceiving the reader, that kind of retouching “was basically seen as good reproduction practices,” said Chronicle Director of Visuals Nicole Frugé. “That was how they made finicky printing presses work well.”
In one egregious example Van Niekerken discovered, some overzealous staffer had cleaned up a shot of Jerry Garcia at his bandmate Pigpen’s funeral, giving the Grateful Dead frontman an unsolicited haircut. “I had the photo and there was all this liquid paper on it to make his beard more nicely groomed,” Van Niekerken said.
“The standards throughout the history of photography have absolutely changed,” said Ken Light, the Reva & David Logan Professor of Photojournalism at U.C. Berkeley.
Before digital photography became the norm, newspaper photographers worked in the darkroom to develop and process their film.
“I remember Chronicle photographers talking about the hand of god, which was when you dodged a print in the darkroom,” Light said. “They used a long coat hanger with a piece of paper attached so you could lighten the face or lighten the background. And that kind of photo process was ethically accepted.
“Those are considered no-nos today,” Light added, “at least in the mainstream media.”
Frugé points to a generational shift in accepted practices for photojournalists over the past 25 to 30 years. Things like setting up photos or removing background elements have become “a fireable offense, as opposed to how you did your job.”
Even as ethical standards for photojournalism have tightened, the ability to manipulate images has exploded. In a Super Bowl ad last month, Google touted the ability to remove people from photos taken with its newest phone. Photoshop and other software can dramatically alter digital images, and social media is full of manipulated photos, from Kardashian-level retouching to run-of-the-mill Facetune. Artificial intelligence is capable of inventing “photographs” from scratch — without a lens or a subject.
“We are living in a dangerous age,” Light said.
However, the history of photojournalism is also full of examples of photographers and publications stepping over the lines. As far back as the Civil War, photographer Alexander Gardner moved a Confederate sharpshooter’s corpse into a more picturesque location to get a better shot. National Geographic squeezed the pyramids closer together to fit on a 1982 magazine cover.
Van Niekerken wondered if something similar was at play with The Chronicle’s image of the U.S.S. Macon. Maybe, he said, the photographer captured a similar frame, but “they did some fudging” to make it fit the four-column opening on a crowded front page.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he said. “To glue the airship on the image is just very surprising. I would like to give them the benefit of the doubt.”
Frugé has a less forgiving assessment of her predecessors’ work in 1933: “The main thing is that you’re not removing things and not adding things. The two biggest lines are what they crossed. They put something in that wasn’t there.”
The U.S.S. Shenandoah Navy airship floats over the San Francisco Chronicle building in this altered 1920s photo.
Chronicle file photo/The ChronicleWe’ll never know exactly why The Chronicle invented that front page photo 90 years ago, but Peter and I found one more image in the archive that may provide a clue to the inspiration behind the Macon fabrication.
It’s a photo of the U.S.S Shenandoah, the first rigid airship built in the United States, likely during a visit to San Francisco in October 1924, nine years before the Macon’s journey. The slender, helium-inflated dirigible is sailing past the Chronicle clock tower, its frame lightly blurred due to the distance. A U.S. flag flaps energetically in the breeze. It looks like someone has used Wite-Out and pen to draw it on — twice.
Reach Sarah Feldberg: sarah.feldberg@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @sarahfeldberg
