I agree it’s disappointing that a publication like National Geographic doesn’t highlight that the photo is manipulated, even if it is a non-digital retouching j

I agree it’s disappointing that a publication like National Geographic doesn’t highlight that the photo is manipulated, even if it is a non-digital retouching job. As to how it happened, considering the image has obvious brush or pen strokes in many places, my bet is that’s all it is. The photo was overexposed and details were blown out in the highlights. Someone tried to add it back, resulting in these strange distorted faces. It did look like upscaling artifacts to me at first, but then you wouldn’t have crisp legible text in the same photo. Still, photo manipulation is photo manipulation, and the reasonable doubt in this discussion is a good example of why it should have been pointed out from the beginning.