From the Baltimore American.

    This is about the season when the industrious citizen who keeps at it through the summer, taking only a day off now and then, turns up some morning at the office with a rich, ripe tomato countenance, reaching from just north of his eyebrows down to the very edge of his collarband. Well, what luck? How many? How big were they? asks the other fellow, who knows from the infallible sign of the tomato complexion that there is a fish story pending, which cannot be suppressed even if the whole office force should sign a resolution of protest.
    When the story comes it is a thriller—so thrilling that doubts naturally arise. Did you count them? Did you measure it? Did you weigh him? Did you catch them all yourself? And so, season after season, this season just the same as other seasons, the fish story is accepted with doubts, misgivings—a suspicion that is by no means carefully concealed, that the piscatorial returns have been tampered with. To brand any narrative as “a fish story” is to discredit it thoroughly and completely.
    Many ingenious methods have been employed to circumvent the doubters and to clear the storied achievements of fishermen from disparaging queries and ungracious innuendos. In recent years the camera has come into general use as the fisherman’s friend—his eye witness—his incorruptible truth-teller that reveals the facts just as they were. On the desk in the office the photograph shows up. To the right in the picture stands the angler with his rod and reel; everybody recognizes him; it is a good likeness. To the left, strung out so that each shows up in detail, are the twenty-seven big ones. In the background there is a glimpse of a boat and some water. The picture ought to be convincing ; to anybody, to everybody, but somehow it is never accepted as unimpeachable evidence. The camera, it is well known, can ; be made to prevaricate in several different ways. The suspicious queries are not put to rest; on the contrary they become more varied and more searching. Is it a trick photograph? Did you have the photographs of one fish pasted in a row twenty-seven times and then the effect copied? Did you buy the photograph and then paste in your own picture and have the fixture rephotographed?
    Ingenious as it is, photographing the catch has failed to carry conviction to a cynical and unbelieving world. The fish story has not been suppressed—it will never be suppressed—but it just stays a fish story. And it is best so; if there were no imagination in a fish story it would be flat indeed.

From— Evening Star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.), 22 July 1905. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.