Single-exposure, undoctored photographs
. . . are the reference point for TTG because they are by far the most-widely trusted kind of photographs worldwide.
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1. Which photos do people trust?
Each viewer’s assessment of a photo is based on that viewer’s “photographic literacy” — what they have learned from years of experience “reading” and interpreting countless single-exposure, undoctored photographs.
No matter how a photograph was made or what it depicts, viewers are much more inclined to trust it if it looks like it is a single-exposure, undoctored photograph than if it does not look like one.
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2. It’s visible in smartphone photos
Most people don’t know it, but when a smartphone “snaps a photo,” it often combines several photos into one image (to improve the quality).
Yet regardless of how many exposures are instantly combined to make a photo, smartphone makers try to ensure that the result looks as much as possible like a single-exposure, undoctored photograph.
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3. It’s visible in every TTG photo
As the combining guide makes clear, the Trust Test list is written so that even when a TTG photograph is made by combining exposures, the result always looks like a single-exposure, undoctored photograph.
See #1403 for more on how TTG ensures what is described above.
See also the viewpoint page on what the public knows about how photographs “work”
“We’re in an unceasing flow of time and events and people, and to make sense of what goes past, we put a beginning and an end to a certain thing, and we leave things out and we heighten other things, and in that way we break the unbroken flow into stories, because that’s the only way we can give it significance.”
— Novelist Tobias Wolff