TTG Plus > More on Viewpoint #25

On “light” and public skepticism

  • 1. It's all about viewers' expectations

    One of the biggest reasons the public is more skeptical of photographs now than even 20 years ago relates to the behavior of “light” in photography.

    • Viewers fully expect photographs to undergo some “changes that are likely to happen anyway” (“light”-related changes)

    • But viewers are naturally more wary of photographs that undergo “changes that never occur on their own” (non-“light”-related changes) — and those are changes that are now possible to make easily, undetectably, and instantly.

  • 2. In the 19th and 20th centuries,

    it was very difficult to make many now-popular non-“light”-related changes — for example selectively moving, blurring, adding, deleting, replacing, reshaping, and resizing “forms and shapes” — without viewers being able to see those changes.

    As a result, apart from a few non-“light”-related basics like cropping, back in the film era the vast majority of photos only underwent “light”-related changes — “tones and colors.”

    “Light”-related changes had been integral to photography almost from its invention, and in fact the word “photo-graphy” came from the Greek for “light-writing.”

  • 3. But in the 21st century,

    viewers are inundated with advertisements showing how easy it is for smartphone users to undetectably perform changes that never occur on their own (non-“light”-related changes).

    Naturally, the public is much more skeptical now about even the most believable-looking images that look like undoctored photographs.

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    For more on the role of “light” in making trustworthy photographs, see this page (also linked in #1 above).