Original SHC caption: "The taking of Vimy Ridge. Canadian dead in foreground." April 1917 Vimy Ridge, France. Official Caption (o.1188)"Canadians occupying old German third line trenches" (From the Photo Guide) *** NOTE: This photo is missing from the Prenter Album. NOTE: Elements of this negative (the two bodies of soldiers in the foreground) were combined with O-1162 (mikan no. 3233066) to form the "Largest Photograph in the World" for the exhibition of Canadian battlefield photographs organized by the Canadian War Records Office (mikan no. 3192389). The link between the retouched or composite O-1162, intended for exhibition purposes, and O-1188, was documented by Dr. Laura Brandon, Historian of War Art at the Canadian War Museum, in her article: Words and Pictures: Writing Atrocity into Canada's First World War Official Photographs, JOURNAL OF CANADIAN ART HISTORY, vol. 31:2. From the article "Beyond the ‘Taking of Vimy Ridge: The War Photographs of William Ivor Castle" by Carla-Jean Stokes in Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, Volume 18, Issue 2, 2017. The second iconic photograph was also taken by William Ivor Castle, and is the launching point of my research. The photograph is entitled the "Taking of Vimy Ridge" and it shows soldiers of the 29th Infantry Battalion advancing across no man’s land. In the foreground we see soldiers marching past dead comrades, and shells bursting in the background. However, this is a manipulated image composed of multiple negatives. The original was first published in London’s Illustrated War News on April 25th, 1917, with the soldiers marching from right to left through the frame, but no dead bodies. The manipulated version was enlarged and put on display in an exhibition of Canadian official war photographs in July 1917. Art historian Laura Brandon argues that the image came to include dead bodies in order to illustrate the heroic cost of victory at Vimy.7 Since 1917, both versions of this photograph have been reproduced countless times into histories of the First World War—with or without acknowledgement of their having been faked. During the summer of 1917, Castle helped organize an exhibition of Canadian war photographs at Grafton Galleries in London. He even gave tours of the exhibition to some of the visitors. The exhibition included a large number of photographs taken at Vimy Ridge, including a massive print of the Taking of Vimy Ridge, enlarged to 11 by 20 feet. The image was widely publicized as the largest photograph in the world, and was listed for sale at £80. Grafton Galleries. Catalogue of the Canadian Official War Photographs Second Exhibition for the Benefit of the Canadian War Memorials Fund (London: Grafton Galleries, July 1917), 20; in a recent email exchange with William Ivor Castle’s granddaughter, I realized I need to qualify the term “fake.” I define it as a photograph that portrays a scene beyond what the photographer could capture in a single shot. It is not a value judgment—rather, it allows historians to understand the methods photographers used in order to create the pictures that they did, within the confines of contemporary photographic technology.