Forward or Delete: This Week's Fake Viral Photos
![](http://images.gawker.com/1284442828793271400/original.jpg)
Occasionally, against all odds, you’ll see an interesting or even enjoyable picture on the Internet. But is it worth sharing, or just another Photoshop job that belongs in the digital trash heap? Check in here and find out if that viral photo deserves an enthusiastic “forward” or a pitiless “delete.”
DELETE
![](http://images.gawker.com/1284442828856041320/original.png)
Faced with a finite number of interesting photos from the past, the internet’s various peddlers of “historical photos” often end up sharing pictures of dubious origin, like the supposed aerial shot of the Beatles’ iconic Abbey Road crossing seen above.
As Twitter’s @PicPedant pointed out, however, the image actually comes from a 2010 ad campaign for Spuk Pictures, a stock photo provider. Using the tagline “See the unseen,” the series showed alternate angles of memorable pictures, like Muhammed Ali’s defeat of Sonny Liston in 1965 and the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind.
Image via Twitter
DELETE
![](http://images.gawker.com/1284442828974339688/original.png)
While geometric dog grooming is indeed practiced by at least one East Asian canine stylist, this photo of Japan’s “newest trend” recently circulated by outfits like Boing Boing and The Huffington Post isn’t of a dog at all, but a doggy mannequin.
The viral image can be traced to a festival held by the Japan Kennel Club in 2012. In it, teams of groomers showed off their talents by styling shaggy dog dolls.
“If you look from the front,” writes the Sepia Pet Care School staffer who originally posted the photo, “it consists of a square ☆.”
Image via Twitter
FORWARD
![](http://images.gawker.com/1284442829052104552/original.png)
Given its cinematic quality, it was easy to dismiss this striking image that hit Reddit on Saturday as fake. However, this is a real photo of a salvage tug connecting to the Hong Kong-registered Shinyo Sawako off the coast of Vietnam in 2007.
Less than six months later, the Shinyo Sawako would be involved in a fatal collision with a Chinese fishing boat that left three dead and 13 missing.
Image via Twitter
DELETE
![](http://images.gawker.com/1284442829109151336/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800.png)
As Gawker’s own Jay Hathaway explained on Thursday, this viral photo supposedly depicting “real American courage” isn’t just fake, it’s incredibly ironic. In reality, the photo shows miniatures posed by the artist Mark Hogancamp, who was beaten into a coma by five men in 2000 after telling them he was a cross-dresser. As a form of therapy, Hogancamp constructed a fictional WWII-era Belgian village—the subject of the 2010 documentary Marwencol—populated with dolls like the two seen above.
Image via Facebook
FORWARD
![](http://images.gawker.com/1284442829307029352/original.png)
Texas’ recent deadly floods have also brought a deluge of bullshit photos, but this improbable image of alligator gar caught in a chain-link fence shows a real incident that occurred in Mathis, Texas last week.
According to fishery biologist John Findeison, the unusual scene is the result of gar responding to greater then normal currents “by swimming upstream and then becoming entangled to the fence.”
“It’s an unfortunate event for those individual gar that did get trapped but it doesn’t hurt the population,” Findeison told KRIS-TV, “it’s not going to be detrimental to any of that.”
Image via Twitter