"While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph." Lewis Hine (1909)“Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second."” — Jean-Luc Godard
Remarks of this kind are familiar. They suggest that images—and unedited photographs in particular—stand in some special relation to truth: that they testify, bear witness, or in some sense “tell” us how things are.
It is easy enough to speak this way, but less easy to say clearly what it amounts to.
We often describe images using terms borrowed from verbal communication. We say that they “convey meaning”, that they “tell” us something, that they “refer” to, “describe” or even “explain” the world. Photographs are said to document, to testify, to lie, or to reveal the truth. In everyday use, such talk is unproblematic. But it can begin to mislead if taken too literally, as though images function in the same way as sentences.
The difficulty becomes clearer if we attend, not to how we speak about images, but to how they are actually used. A photograph of a cup does not say anything. It does not assert, deny, or qualify. It does not exhibit anything like the structure of a sentence. Yet this does not make it empty or inert. On the contrary, its effectiveness lies precisely in the fact that it does not need to be read in this way. One simply sees what it is of. This recognition is typically immediate. No decoding is required, no translation into words. The question of what an image is about may be open, and often contested, but the question of what it is of is usually resolved without effort. Only after this does the further question—what it is about—begin to arise, and that question is rarely straightforward. We readily distinguish between uncertainty at these two levels. An ambiguous image may prompt disagreement about what it is of, but once that is settled, differences in interpretation do not ordinarily cast it back into doubt. What it shows remains stable, even where what it is taken to mean does not. This difference is important because if it made no difference what an image was of, then it could be replaced without loss by a description. In most cases, it cannot.
Part of what makes this possible is the use of illusionistic effects, with perspectival distortion as a particularly clear example. Images are made so that, under suitable conditions, they resemble what they depict closely enough for recognition to occur directly. Lines, tones, perspective, shading, focus—these are not arbitrary devices, but ways of exploiting regularities in how we see. A drawing can suggest depth; a photograph can stand in for what it shows, not completely, and not without remainder, but sufficiently for it to be taken, in certain respects, for the thing itself.
It is important to note that photographs are not, for the most part, illusions in any strong sense. We do not generally mistake them for the things they depict. But they employ illusionistic means, and under particular conditions—distance, blur, scale, lighting—they can produce effects that approach indistinguishability. The possibility of illusion is built into their operation, even where it is not realised.
Words do not work in this way. Words do not resemble the things they are about. Their use depends upon learned conventions, upon the ability to follow rules and to participate in practices of predication. Images make use of quite different capacities. They engage perception directly, relying not on symbolic substitution, but on visible similarities. For this reason, it is not obvious that images should be treated as bearers of truth or falsehood in the same way as sentences. A statement can be true or false because it asserts something about how things are. An image may depict something that did not occur, or present things in a misleading way, but it does not itself make an assertion. It shows, and what is shown can then be taken up in various ways. This is not to deny that images can be used in acts of deception, or that they can mislead. But the source of that deception lies in how images are used, combined, or interpreted—not in the image taken in isolation. Just as a gesture can be misleading without being a lie, so an image can mislead without asserting anything at all.
Two questions are often asked of an image: what is it of? and what is it about? The first is more basic. Without some answer to it, the second cannot get started. The temptation to reverse this order—to treat images primarily as vehicles of meaning—is understandable, but it risks obscuring the conditions under which they function.
This is perhaps most evident in theoretical discussions, where images are frequently assimilated to models drawn from language. They are described as signs, as messages, as objects to be decoded. Such frameworks can be useful, but they can also encourage the thought that images depend fundamentally on processes of interpretation, in the sense in which words do. What recedes in this picture is the extent to which images rely upon ordinary perceptual capacities—on the ability to recognise, to discriminate, and to respond to visual similarities. These capacities do not depend on linguistic competence, although they can be extended and organised by it.
In this respect, images might better be understood as things used in acts of showing. They make aspects of the world available in a way that can be shared. What follows from that—what they mean, how they are interpreted, what role they play—depends upon the practices in which they are embedded or inserted.
The appeal to truth, then, may be less fundamental than it appears. When we say that an image shows the truth, we are not attributing truth to the image itself so much as situating it within a wider context of use. A photograph may serve as evidence; it may support or undermine a claim. But the truth does not reside in the image as such. To recognise this is not to diminish the importance of images, but to clarify it. Their force lies not in their ability to state or to assert, but in their capacity to present—to place something before us in a way that can be taken up, examined, and discussed.
It is in that taking up, rather than in the image itself, that questions of truth and falsity arise.