Rich, thanks for your thoughts in this thread. I am not certain though whether you were being facetious and thus stating in the the 'bold above' as a corellation of photoshop, staging etc.?
Could you clarify please. Thanks
Not being facetious but stating a fact.
At best a photograph is selective about any truth it shows - even assuming that we take the image as an exact objective record of a scene, we only see what the photographer wants us to: what's outside of the frame may change the context entirely (and that's ignoring any technological impacts - influence of the lens, blur, B&W vs colour, colour accuracy...). That's what my example with the alternative framings of the "dead" person underlines - depending on the crop, the photographer implies different causes of death.
At worst, we can't trust a photograph at all, especially with today's ease of manipulation.
That said, I know truth and photography is kind of a big deal these days, with certain photographers getting rather hot under the collar, but I personally think it's a non-issue. Think about films - as in moving images: fiction (movies) and non-fiction (documentaries) have co-existed for over century, yet we typically have no problem with this, and find it easy to decide which we're looking at simply from the context. In fact, we enjoy spoofs that blur them, such as "Spinal Tap".
I suppose photographs are more problematic re. truth vs fiction if you're looking at only a single photograph. You'd have the same problem if, say, you saw a still from a movie or a short extract of video. In these cases, you don't have enough context.
So perhaps the way forwards is the death of the single photograph, with photographers increasingly creating multiple images - albums, projects. This is already happening at a very fast rate in many areas of photography (excluding documentary, which has always worked in series), and it is becoming unusual to find a contemporary art photographer who creates single, standalone images (I don't and never will).
Another marker of this trend for multiple images to provide context is the rise of the photobook - once a publishing niche, it has increased in importance massively over the past decade, to the extent that if you're a professional photographic journalist or artist, producing a book as the end point of a project is almost an expectation.
