What if I told you that every photograph you have ever seen or taken is a lie?
We are all aware that Photoshop exists and that the photographs of celebrities we see in magazines aren’t completely honest; we have all, at some point, dabbled in editing our own pictures, whether it be through filters on Snapchat and Instagram or making adjustments through Facetune and other photo editing apps. However, we tend to think of other photographs as being 100% honest, such as photographs taken by documentary photographers, or even photographs we take ourselves and upload straight to social media without touching any editing tools. This line of thinking is, unfortunately, flawed.
Psychological studies have shown that everything in life is about perception, and that perception is shaped by our experiences; the same is true about photography. Photographers bend everything to their own angle to reflect their version of reality. You can put two photographers in the same place at the same time and they will take two completely different photographs; neither photograph is more “truthful” about the place than the other, they are simply taken from individual vantage points. It is like two people being at the same party and one person saying “this party is the best party ever!” and the other saying “this party sucks!”; each person is stating what they think about the party based on their own experience of it, and neither person is “right” or “wrong” in their statement.
Every time we take a picture, we intentionally frame certain elements and leave out others. For example: I could take a photograph of one tidy corner of my room and caption it “My room is so clean right now!” while, behind me, everything else is a total wreck. The caption lied, but, because you saw a photograph, you took it as “evidence” that the caption was true.
Let’s give another example. How many times have you been dragged into taking a photograph with your family where everyone went into it grumbling? In the photograph, everyone is smiling and looks happy to be there, but you know that, in all honesty, no one wanted to do it and no one was happy. The picture tells one story, but behind it is a completely different one.
Let’s give one last example. You are looking through a history book, and in it are pictures of various historical figures, pictures from wars, pictures from events throughout time. These photographs are, of course, of real people, of real events, and, because of this, you take the photograph and what it represents at face-value. It is true because it is history, and history really happened. Except for one thing — those photographs tell only one version of what “really happened,” and the rest is dropped off into space and time, never to be known about. Furthermore, as I discussed earlier, the photographer, consciously or unconsciously, framed the photograph to tell the story they wanted to tell, not to tell the story as it necessarily was.
This is not to say that photographs are not powerful tools. Photographs are powerful tools in documenting people, places, and events, in solving crimes, in studying medicine and science; photographs can even be drivers of social change. What I am saying, however, is that you have to be critical of what you are looking at and not assume that, because it is a photograph, it is “the truth,” because the truth is that we use photographs to manipulate the truth, whether we mean to or not. The truth is that photography is not about truth at all because there is no singular truth to anything; it is about showing others the world either as we see it or as we want it to be seen.