Author: Pam Morris - March 13th 2015
It is an old adage “the Camera doesn’t lie “but people of today automatically question the credibility of an ‘unbelievable’ photograph. When did we stop trusting the evidential truth of a photograph and was our past faith in a photo’s inherent veracity to portray reality, naive at best? With the increasing propensity for people to manipulate photographs and the ever advancing technology on ways that they can be manipulated, we need to ask what is being established within the photographic community to ensure that we can always determine whether or not a photo is truthfully portraying reality.
Introduction
The hypothesis that people have generally lost their faith in a photographic image depicting reality was born when a casual viewer of one of my photographs immediately dismissed it as a fake citing that it had obviously been edited in Photoshop®. The photo of two butterflies (Figure 1) which had been displayed as captured and had not been post-processed at all, except for being cropped, was the result of hours of waiting for the perfect moment. This critique highlighted the changed social attitude towards photographic truth. Whereas in the past people generally assumed that a photographic image had captured the ‘truth’, nowadays people assume the opposite; that unless someone can prove otherwise, an ‘unbelievable’ image is assumed to have been manipulated.
This raises a number of questions :
· When did this shift in attitude occur?
· What is ‘truth’ in a visual image and in photography.
· Has this the ‘truth’ always been manipulated but we have only recently become aware of its increasing prevalence?
· What can we as the photographic industry do to ensure that viewers can assess the validity of an image.
Figure 1 Pam Morris Mirrored Butterflies 2013