Photography Is an Honest Lie

the dual nature of capturing the world can only be measured in degrees

In the public arena, photography is a long-standing winner of truth-telling contests, beating older forms of visual representation that aim to approximate reality with brushstrokes, chisel-chipping or textile-loops. The camera as a tool establishes a more direct relationship with the subject, at least from an optical point of view. That much is obvious. Some perceive that connection as mechanical and call photography a lesser art form, or no art at all; others find poetry in the light of a star materializing time, thus falling in love with a singular artistic pursuit.

Meanwhile, the academic discourse—held in little dark rooms away from the limelight—has been digging deeper into the scientific nature and ontological meaning of photography as a conductor of truth. Two schools of thought compete for the deepest finding (one unearthing photographic lies, the other photographic truths), and both are certain that they got to the bottom of it while the other is building sandcastles in the air. In the (artificial) light of AI, the debate has become more visible as you can see here, and aligning its polarized angles more urgent.

Because the gist is this: if we ask whether photographers use their cameras to lie or tell the truth, the answer is both and neither. Both dogmas are right all the way up to the point where they start being wrong. To narrow nuance and flatten the dual nature of photographs—lie AND truth—leaves us with a smaller package that might be easier to carry through academic hallways, but contains only chunks of the whole truth.

Faithful to my believe and credo Nuance or Nothing, I try to look at photographs through both epistemological lenses. Here’s what I see when I do so with one eye open, then the other, and then both:

photography tells the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth

As an almost magical technical method to capture and store photons—either chemically or electronically, via film or sensor—photography has such a monopoly on accuracy and with it truth, that more interpretive forms of static representation can’t compete with it. If photography is a mirror of reality, other disciplines are whatever came before the mirror: polished metal, still water, obsidian glass.

What happened in the picture, really happened. It was a moment in time that existed. Period. A constellation of forms, illuminated and thus verified by light.

Now, on to the other eye for a new angle:

photography divorces us from reality and invents its own worlds

Photography’s trick to trap the truth is really just that—a trick—when you look closer. Zoom in on the photographer: they decide what enters the frame and what stays outside the visual narrative; they don’t give you the bigger picture, let alone the whole picture. And they can make certain things appear in a certain light, quite literally so, and even more so figuratively. Selective lighting, manipulative camera settings, and skinny or poor captions can lead you far away from the actual scene and how it looked through actual eyes at the time.

Photographers snap the shot whenever they please, and that could be right before or after the subject or object is at their most natural, making a person look mighty or mighty stupid, misrepresenting the Australian outback on that one day of the year it rains, forging an uncrowded Eiffel Tower that one second of the day no one is watching.

Moving on, a static photograph is no match for the endless motion picture that is reality, and while photographers can capture movement in some ways, they get there on crutches.

But photography’s limitations are not limited to the photographer. The viewer contributes to the restrictions just as much, arriving at the picture with their own mind full of preconceptions, selective attention, and sheer bias. We all look at the same picture with different eyes, and not just literally, and that’s not just rhetoric.

All these shortcomings of truth-telling are before post-processing fictionalizes the plot further, whether we do the editing or a camera’s built-in technology does it for us, especially if it relies on contemporary algorithmic assistance.

The sum of these evitable and inevitable modifications of reality makes the camera a tool of manipulation that individuals and institutions can use and abuse to invent parallel worlds. Its very accuracy, then, makes it deceiving.

reconciling the truest truth in the middle

Blink, blink, now both eyes on the prize. As with so many prized opinions, the two opposing views on photography’s role are two sides of the same coin, and to devalue either of them doesn’t make the other more precious. Picking a side if both sides come with the other, is like picking a fight for the fight’s sake, not for truth’s sake. Of course, it is the tendency of theorists to postulate loudly, loudlier, loudliest by quieting nuance—in a noisy environment you must scream for attention if you think you have something to say—but that doesn’t make their incomplete truths truer.

The truest truth here resides in close proximity to reality somewhere in the middle. Between the poles of photography’s dual nature. A photograph is both a testament of truth and evidence of a lie. Or, in short, it is both truth and lie. Or, more accurately, it is both true and false to some degree.

Photography captures fragments and fractions of reality, and, in doing so, relays versions of the truth. And some are truer than others.

Let’s start where nobody seems to be taking the debate: genre.

Of course we can call a painting a painting, but that doesn’t tell us much without specifying whether we’re talking about impressionism or realism, abstract shapes or precise depictions. How can we discuss the truthfulness of photography aptly, if we don’t distinguish between genres like fine art and documentary?

The former stages the inner worlds of an imaginative photographer to establish artistic credibility and truthfulness to vision; the other shoots for descriptive credibility and truthfulness to accuracy while depicting the world outside of the photographer. It is aided by captions that expand on the context and clarify the details. Both genres capture reality optically in the form of light dancing down a lens barrel; but one invents meaning beyond the physical elements in front of the scene, the other reports it (assuming documentary photographers perform their job meticulously and ethically).

Let’s give this some more conTEXT.

I’ve briefly mentioned captions, because, well, they are brief, contrary to the lengthier paragraph I will hitch this convoluted sentence to.

While titles might take precedence over captions when fine art photographs meet the world, full texts are much needed companions for any series of photos. Both fine art statements and press articles lend additional meaning to pictures. A text surrounding a set of fine art photographs is an internal exploration of the artist’s mind and heart, dissecting their ideas, visions, and journey—something subtle and dreamy that is best expressed through lyrical writing. The other is an external discovery of the world, using language as more of a precision tool to recount what happened beyond the obvious imagery. One evokes, one informs, so they are not equally eager to tell sober truths.

Next theme: themes.

Photographers want to tell visual stories that matter, that stand out, that are worth telling. Nothing much newsworthy about a day like any other in a place like any other. Nothing captivating about a boring studio portrait of an everyman. Nothing much to look at if it’s nothing much to look at.

Trying to find something different, something more extra than ordinary, everybody is looking in the same obvious places: at the fringes of society, in faraway lands, or extreme situations. And it’s a good thing to shed light on who and what is usually overlooked—marginalized minorities and scandalous subcultures, Mongolian eagle hunters and South Sudanese cattle herds, heroes and catastrophes. But it becomes problematic for whoever gets stereotyped, wherever it leads to exotified fetishization, and whenever it sensationalizes so dramatically that extreme events feel like the norm.

Averages are boring. But, by definition, they are most people’s experience and therefor populated with a lot of truth. If we don’t capture them, photography skews reality.

That’s why my artistic ambition, as a traveling writer and photographer (not to be confused with a travel writer or photographer), is to inch towards more comprehensive truths in the broad middle between narrow extremes. Covering some of the poles and much of the rest.

Then, there’s style.

My friend Rosmery is an impossibly talented painter. Her hyper-realistic portraits are more reminiscent of photographs than some of the hyper-edited photography out there that looks like painted. She uses photographs as inspiration for the candid facial expressions she paints, so one could say that her works are firmer representations of reality than heavily staged and edited fine art photographs with their conceptual overexaggerations. Not as truthful, optically, but more truthful factually. It is the difference between a truth of light and a truth of meaning.

While we’re at editing: I don’t spend a lot of time in the digital darkroom, and any excess of post-production feels dishonest to me (to see how AI factor’s into edited aesthetics, check out this little stunt of mine). I do, however, try to adjust the picture to the degree I failed to capture it accurately with my camera settings, so that it resembles more closely what I perceived with my eyes at the time and at the scene (of course that recollection is porous). I also correct for artificial effects introduced by the camera that aren’t part of reality (like chromatic aberration) to increase truthfulness.

Arriving at the gatekeepers.

With all that said, the truthfulness of photography also depends on those who control its circulation. Somebody decides what gets seen and how much of it. But there is a difference between the propaganda apparatuses engineered by totalitarian regimes, and democratic institutions that distribute photographs more independently and benevolently. Of course, that too is a matter of degrees.

There’s a lot more to the truthfulness of photography, but that might be enough to drive the point home. Let’s wrap it up with some examples for take away.

Grumpy Winston Churchill is an iconic portrait that reveals the statesman’s infamous moodiness, but hides the fact that photographer Yousuf Karsh provoked the demeanor by taking away the old man’s cigar. A candid shot with the cigar and smoke and all would have been more true to the situation the moment occurred in, as described by Karsh. Color, too, would have transported more of the reality witnessed by those in the room, but black and white photography was still more practical in 1941.

Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother is a candid moment, but it might have us believe that poverty equals misery and that the Great Depression translated directly from economics to mental wellbeing, having everyone depressed always.

In Jacobus Rentmeester’s Jumpman, Michael Jordan looks like he is flying, but at least he flies in color.

The Situation Room by Pete Souza could show just another day at the White House if it weren’t for its publicized context: the then-administration following live updates of a military operation that led to the killing of Osama Bin Laden.

Saigon Execution—captured by Eddie Adams somewhat accidently without anticipating what was about to happen—is brutal on more levels than the obvious first: a man being shot in the head. Adams captured it during the Vietnam War, and the photograph’s wide circulation is considered a significant contribution to a shift in public opinion. What came to haunt Adams, is the fact that the context of the photo never received the same attention. Yes, the brutality was real, but real means that it didn’t happen inside a vacuum—it happened within a causal chain of events that explain the brutality without necessarily excusing it. The executioner wasn’t as bad a man as it seems, and the executed not as innocent. But the twist of the twist is this: despite all misrepresentation and misinterpretation, or because of it, the picture’s message became true and influential: war is cruel, let’s end it.

“Let’s end it” is also a good motto for dealing with the debate around photography’s abilities and limitations to tell the truth. Between the epistemological angles the prevailing schools of thought offer—lie-or-truth, yes-or-no—the truthfulness of photography is a nuanced matter of degrees, and those degrees matter. Any theory that leans too much towards one side or the other, looks awkward in its attempts to reach for fundamentals. Any hypothesis that is tilted all the way to one side or the other, has already fallen.