The Brooklyn Rail

Whether as a disputed term within political debates or as a photographic quality mortally threatened by new technologies, truth has become a central flashpoint in our current cultural moment. Does truth have a future? If so, what will that truth look like? If we are to continue speaking truth to power, how can that speaking be made effective? Are there things to learn from the history of truth, especially as it has been manifested in photographic terms?

That’s not a bad place to start, given the long association of photographs with truthfulness. The camera doesn’t lie, or so many photojournalists would like us to believe. But even a perfunctory examination of this claim reveals its complexity. As early as 1844, photography’s English inventor, William Henry Fox Talbot, pointed out that his photographs faithfully recorded the details of things (like the intricate patterns of a piece of lace) but not the truth of their appearance. A piece of black lace, for example, appeared as a series of intersecting white lines on his sepia-colored paper, having had its tonal values reversed during the contact-printing process. The photograph certifies that the lace once touched the paper and left its imprint there, but does not tell you exactly what the lace looked like. In 1980, French scholar Roland Barthes formalised this complication by describing photographs as offering a truth-to-presence rather than a truth-to-appearance.

A moment’s thought confirms this formula. The making of every photograph involves the calculated calibration of visual information captured in an exposure to light, even as it also involves the privileging of just one moment of time over many others and the flattening of a moving, three-dimensional world onto a geometrically proportioned, two-dimensional surface. Photographs are capable of showing us what the world might look like in a photograph, but that’s not the same as telling us the truth of that world. Anyone who has ever photographed (which is just about everyone) knows this.

What is surprising, then, is our own surprise when we are forced to confront these facts of photographic life. Did we really think that promotional photographs released by Britain’s royal family would not be idealised in post-production? And yet this revelation caused a furore in the press (Reuters issued a dramatic “picture kill” notice)—as if this minor transgression of the rules of the game was more important than what the photograph represents: an effort to obfuscate the fact that Britain claims to be a democracy while retaining an unelected head of state. But the problem here is not a matter of what has or hasn’t been done to enhance this particular picture; the problem lies in our own faux-naïve expectations of photographs in general.

From where do those expectations come? Why do we want to believe in photographs, even when we know that we should not? This is surely the question that has to be asked. And this is especially so if we wish to link this belief to the currently pitiable status of truthfulness within the political sphere. Never has truth, whether in the form of ethical behaviour or verifiable evidence, seemed to have less purchase on the decision making of our fellow citizens. Perhaps a consideration of our relationship to the truth values of photographs can provide an insight into the popularity of a phenomenon like “Truth Social” as well?

The presumption that photographs are truthful is, at some level, a consequence of the manner of their making. The camera’s projected illusion of recessional space, a humanist invention of the Renaissance, places the viewer of every camera-made photograph at the centre of all that is seen in it. That photograph’s perspectival image converges on an individual’s eyes, bringing the chaos of the visible universe to order, and seemingly under our personal control. Photographs reassure us by making the things we see in them knowable and nameable. That reassurance is enhanced by the indexical formation of photographic images. For photographs are distinctive in being directly and physically caused by their referents, without the intervention of a human hand. Light is reflected off things in the world to activate chemical or electronic sensors in a way that automatically leaves a visible trace on a given substrate.

That trace points us to the past presence of the thing or event which has generated it. This pointing is another important element of photography’s truth claims. Photographs may not tell us exactly what things look like, but they do testify that those things were once there in front of the camera. As Barthes put it, the photograph may be “false on the level of perception” but it is “true on the level of time.” Rendering the world in historical terms, photographs appear to stop time in its tracks, and, we hope, can somehow do the same for us. Our trust in photographs therefore has an almost theological aspect (hence the upset when they are tampered with; apart from its dishonesty, to manipulate a photograph is to mess with space and time). But photography’s promise of immortality comes at a price—the suspension of our critical faculties, the surrender of those faculties to faith. We are asked to believe in what we see rather than question the nature of that belief. Tests by psychologists reveal that people are more likely to assume a text is true if a photograph, even if it is just a picture of the author, appears alongside it. Truth, it turns out, is generated by a desire not dependent on evidence or facts. It is a photographic effect, rather than a photographic attribute.

All the more reason for us to remain sceptical and inquiring viewers of photographs, and of our own investments in them. This is a lesson we would do well to apply to life in general. Appearances can be deceptive. That’s why we need to look well beyond those appearances and continually seek to distinguish the true from the false, and what is right from what is wrong.