Photographic Truth

At the heart of the current discourse on still photography in the digital age remains a concern that the “objective truth” of photographs is threatened as image makers digitally alter images into constructions that bear no relation to the reality from which they were originally taken. It is implied that still photographs deal with objective truth, whereas the digital photograph is freed from such an obligation. If the objective truth is argued to be an obsolete concept, then, by extension, so is the traditional still photograph. But although the critical debate on still photography is far from closed, as a starting point, photographic truth may be understood as a partial and constructed truth, the product of a technical form of mediation originating from and appealing to human subjectivities and therefore as subjective a means of understanding as it is objective.

As new technologies are invented, those enamored with them are often quick to apply Darwinian notions of “the survival of the fittest,” prophesying the extinction of existing media. Before accepting that the traditional still photograph is a “less evolved species” than the digital photograph because it is “tied to objective truth,” it is necessary to examine whether the still photograph ever represented any kind of objective truth in the first place. Likewise, before labeling still photography an “endangered species” and carting it off to the ready-to-go-extinct pile, it is important to uncover how it is that it ever came to be regarded as “the truth.”

When one examines the past for clues to the present, what comes to the surface is a dominant ideology that has narrowed and confined the discussions on still photography from its beginnings. What becomes more apparent is how the still photograph, since its invention, may have never been objective; it may have never been “the truth.” Although the still photograph attests to its subject's existence in a way that no preceding pictorial form did before it, existence is not synonymous with truth. Rather, the photograph may have always been a construction shaped by a dance of negotiation between objective and subjective processes, convention and invention, nature and culture, reality and illusion. An additional layer of this exploration might even show that the emergence of the digital photograph may have only pushed further the split from reality that the still photograph had already begun. The medium of photography, in both traditional still and digital forms, explores identity through visual representations of the self and others. The concept of photographic truth further textures the extent to which photography constructs, maintains, and challenges notions of identity. Additionally, this concept raises ongoing questions of what photography can reveal about identity.