Photography was originally considered a way to objectively represent reality, completely untouched by the photographer’s perspective. However, photographers manipulate their pictures in various ways, from choosing what to shoot to altering the resulting image through computer digitalization. The manipulation inherent to photography brings to light questions about the nature of truth. All art forms manipulate reality in order to reveal truths not apparent to the uncritical eye.

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Scientific, news, artistic and documentary photography all use the archetype of beauty as a connection to truth. Beauty, however, is based on the beliefs of a culture and does not necessarily define truth. Understanding of photographic truth, like all other truths, depends on an understanding of culture, belief, history, and the universal aspects of human nature.

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[This is an abstract of the original thesis presented to the graduate school of the University of Florida in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of master of arts in mass communication, University of Florida 1998]

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Many people see the phrase “Truth in Journalism” as an oxymoron these days. From such incidents as an NBC news crew blowing up a car to illustrate the dangers of a particular brand of automobile, to a reporter for the Boston Globe who admitted that she created sources in order to better tell a story, the public is left wondering what in journalism is really true and what is fabricated. This mistrust extends to the photographs used in news stories. With digital manipulation, for instance, photographs can be seamlessly altered to reflect whatever the photographers or editors wish to show. When the O.J. Simpson murder case was the biggest news story of the day, the picture of Simpson on Time’s cover had noticeably darker skin than the same mug shot picture featured on Newsweek or another prominent news magazines. When the public became aware of the altered photograph, Time justified the manipulation by calling the picture “cover art,” and therefore not subject to the same standards as straight news photographs. Adam Clayton Powell III wrote, “The editors argued that it was not unethical, because Time covers are art, not news, a possible surprise to unsuspecting readers who thought they were looking at photographic reality.”
A news photograph is often not just an interesting picture used to highlight a story; sometimes, it is a mode of storytelling that incorporates ideas of truth, reality, cultural value systems, and perception.

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A History of Manipulation
‍When photography was first introduced 150 years ago, it was seen as the perfect documentary medium because the mechanical nature of the medium ensured unadulterated, exact replicas of the subject matter. The technological advances of cameras and the subsequent development of photojournalism led to clearer, more realistic photos. Although many news photographers claim their photographs represent the undistorted truth, in actuality a great deal of manipulation goes into the production and publication of a photograph. The photographer chooses what aspect of reality he wishes to represent both when he takes the picture, and when he readies it for publication. Even when a photographer tries to capture the scene precisely, he may miss representing the essence of the scene before him.

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‍Digital Imaging
‍Computer technology has been applied to photography, creating digital imaging and a new realm of ethical qualms. Because digital images can be seamlessly altered, there has been a great deal of hand wringing about the “evils” of practicing this type of photography. The advent of digital imaging causes us to question and redefine the nature of the photographic visual medium, just as the invention of photography caused artists to re-evaluate the nature of painting.

Digital imaging actually differs from photography as much as photography differs from painting. Photographs are analogous, or continuous, representations of space with infinite spatial or tonal variations. Digital images, on the other hand, are composed of discrete pixels. The images are encoded by dividing the picture into a Cartesian grid of cells. In digital imaging, as in standard photography, writing, or conversation, we must depend on the integrity of the communicator while still maintaining a healthy dose of skepticism, so as not to be erroneously persuaded. Digital imaging is not “an evil,” as described by some in the industry, but merely another tool at the photographer’s disposal.

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Photography and Perception
‍Biologically everyone perceives images the same way. Visual sensory perception is based on the functions of the eye – light enters the eye, hits the cells of the retina, and the brain interprets the impulses of those optical cells into coherent, understandable forms. Differences in the perception of images arise from the cognitive aspect of perception – the interpretation of what those images mean. Signs are not inherently understood, but learned through living in a particular culture. Photographs are referred to as iconic signs – those signs that closely resemble the thing they represent. We read photographs as we read the world around us, a world that is full of uses, values and meanings.

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‍Reality, Perception and Truth
‍If reality is historically and culturally based there cannot be a “ultimate reality” but instead highly variable and subjective realities. A shift of one’s frame of reference can alter reality, and such shifts often occur, either gradually, such as in the natural development of a culture over time, or instantly, as with the discovery of a new scientific theory. If our notion of reality depends on this world that we “made up,” through our measurements, culture and history, it would follow that our notion of truth is also a product of such factors. By this view, truth is just another contextual measurement by which we judge reality. From this standpoint, how “true” or “false” something is, depends on our perceptions. If we view reality through our frames of reference, and frames of reference shift over time, it would naturally follow that our ideas of truth will change over time as well.

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Modern Philosophy and Truth
The relativistic philosophy explained above, that truth is a product of culture, which alters over time, is a central conviction of postmodernism. According to the postmodern viewpoint, culture is constructed, and because our ideas of reality are entirely dependent on culture, reality is also constructed. According to postmodernists, we cannot separate our human perspective from reality, therefore we can never really know what reality is. This is why many believed photography could be the perfect postmodern art form: photography was originally seen as a purely mechanical, objective means of communication, solving the postmodern dilemma of human perceptual interference.

A quality of the photographic negative is that it allows for multiple, identical reproductions of an image. With digital photography, perfect reproductions became possible, without the degradation to which negatives were susceptible. This mechanical reproduction negates the individualism of a work of art. Some would argue that the very nature of photography created the postmodernist viewpoint. In postmodernism, there is no such state as individualism because we are all products of our culture; we are all stamped-out products of the machine age. This denial of the individual denies personal emotion and unique viewpoints. Postmodernism did not just grow out of photography, however; it also stemmed from Marxism, semiotics, poststructuralism, feminism, and psychoanalysis. Modernism has a belief in originality, progress and the power of the individual. Modernism uses the symbolic language of images, and it has a much more optimistic outlook than does postmodernism. According to modernism, we are not imprisoned by our culture, rather, by living in culture we become tutored in a rich symbolic language. The modernist theory that images contain signs which must be decoded in order to be understood comes from Structuralism.
The modernist concern for the “essence and purity” of art is a concern with the representation of truth, and the modernist “belief in universality” is a belief in absolute truths. Postmodernism instead supports the relativistic position explained earlier in this paper. In the postmodern world there is no such thing as absolute truth. The postmodernist believes that truth is socially constructed.
An acceptance of postmodernism does not necessarily discount modernism, even though the two often are in direct opposition. Because there does not appear to be a consensus about the definition of “truth,” it is still debated, and philosophy often plays out this debate in the art world. According to the scholar Lawrence Beyer, the whole purpose of art is to uncover hidden truths, thus making it the ideal platform from which to conduct the debate.

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The Function of Art
‍Artists aspire to achieve the same type of understanding about truth as do other schools of knowledge. The word “fact” is derived from the Latin factum: a thing done or made. Works of art, or artifacts, are made or created with skill, hence a close relationship between the words “art” and “fact.” Not only can art simplify in order to show what matters, but it can also often show us things previously unseen; art shows us more.

By taking such liberties with reality, by uncovering and revealing underlying meanings, by showing us “what matters,” the artist can help us make sense of the world. This is one reason art has always been with us. Humans have always had a need to understand who we are and why we are here. These are the fundamental questions that science and philosophy grapples with and, more often than not, fails to answer.

At times, artists have been mere tools, used by those in power to convince the masses of a particular ideology.

Art as Persuasion
The ability of art to persuade the masses goes back to the beginning of written history. At times, artists have been mere tools, used by those in power to convince the masses of a particular ideology.

According to John Merryman and Albert Elsen, the concept of the artist as a political and cultural rebel is a modern idea. When artists began working independently, fulfilling their own agendas and espousing their own beliefs, they often acted in opposition to the ruling government or dominant religion. Thus, art has often been used as a form of political or social persuasion, either as a tool of the ruling class or church, or as a mode of argument against government and the values of the majority. More recently, especially with the growth of advertising, art has come to be used as a form of consumer and cultural persuasion. For instance, professional artists today practice a form of consumer persuasion when they try to attract purchasers and get them to invest in their products. Art today is more often viewed as a commodity to be bought and sold rather than as a significant political statement.

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Persuasive Art: Documentary Photography
‍One reason art is practiced is due to the human need for understanding. Another function of art is to satisfy the need to keep a record of events that are deemed significant. Before photography, events were chronicled through written accounts or through various forms of pictorial representation. Photography enabled people to document significant events with more visual accuracy than any other medium. Documentarists always knew that some manipulation was necessary in order to make a point, however much they denied it. Most documentarists never admitted to manipulation until after the documentary movement of the thirties and forties was over. But they all understood that documentary truth has to be created, that literal representation in photography can fail to signify the fact or issue at hand. Documentarists need to convey stories with meaning, and their methods in doing so can often bring documentary photography out of the world of straight news photography and closer to the realm of art.

Documentarists often try to achieve a level of drama and sensitivity in their photographs on par with art, to combine straight news photographs with artistic methods to tell a compelling, emotional story. This dramatization of truth allows photographers “to capture particular truths while simultaneously transcending them to reach a level of universal truth,” a function of art as discussed above.

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Documentaries need to speak in a language the audience can understand, so documentarists often employ certain structural techniques used in fiction, “both to give coherence to the story they are telling and to ensure that audiences are able to relate to the events being played out before them.” Documentarists achieve this both in the manner of how the photographic subject is represented, in the captions that typically accompany documentary photographs, or in the story that the photographs highlight. The balance between structural and narrative ploys needed to increase interest, and the honest reproduction of events, is one of the most difficult and hotly debated topics among documentarists.

The documentary medium is a form of storytelling that persuades the audience to see the subject matter in a particular light. Documentary photography is especially powerful and compelling because of its close association with immediacy and truth. Documentaries can be seen as tools of persuasion in that audiences tend to fall in line with the documentary’s argument. It is not always the documentary photographer, however, who shapes the story.

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We do not consider art to be untruthful, but we do understand it to be a deliberately fictional representation of reality.

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Photography, because it mechanically reproduces the scene before it, was at first considered to be a method of representation that excluded the artist’s perspective. However, I have thus far shown how photography is an inherently manipulative medium. To call photography untruthful is not correct; a quality of art is that it does manipulate in order to reveal truth, or to show us aspects of the world we normally would never consider. We do not consider art to be untruthful, but we do understand it to be a deliberately fictional representation of reality.

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Myth and Meaning
‍Art is often used as a tool by ruling powers to persuade the masses. Often, religious leaders have been the dominant authority figures of a culture, and thus art and religion have a long, entwined history. Art has been used to celebrate various religions throughout the world for centuries. Religious leaders have also used art to strengthen their authority over the populace. Although our post-industrial society prides itself on rationality, our current stories and art make use of many of the same themes as religious mythology.
Even our journalism and news photographs rely on this mythic-based dialogue to transmit certain ideas, thoughts, and values. The myths of a modern culture conform to suit the character of the culture, and are often so well disguised that we do not even think of them as “myths.”
Every culture has myths, however they merely take on an acceptable shape, changing and adapting to suit a culture’s tastes and standards. Although the superficial details of mythic stories change over the course of time, the underlying meanings remain consistent. These unchanging values of myths are called archetypes: original models after which other things are patterned. Myths are distinctive forms of speech, narratives that are familiar and reassuring to the host culture. Myths are a culture’s way of trying to articulate the core concerns and preoccupations of society. Karl Jung saw mythic archetypes as recurring patterns, or universal blueprints, in the human psyche. Jung stated that our belief in myth is reflected in our dreams, and that by unlocking the mythic code of our dreams we can come to an understanding about our lives. Jung believed that such an understanding could lead to meaning, direction, order and a sense of wholeness. Because myths guide us through human experience common to all, we view them, either consciously or not, as reflecting the deepest truths of life. And perhaps, because myth reflects the unchanging facets of the human experience and human nature, they do represent absolute truths. Postmodernism states that truths change over time because human culture and perceptions change over time, but the existence of myth proves there are some aspects of humanity which remain indifferent to the passage of time.

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News & Documentary Photography and Myth
‍The purveyors of myth hold a great deal of influential power within a culture. Previously, the purveyors of myth were almost solely religious authorities. In our more secular society, journalists often fill this role. Through the dispersion of news, journalists tell stories that address societal concerns. Journalists are storytellers in our culture, only they must remain true to real events in their telling, rather than create or transform events as a novelist or movie maker does. Journalists pride themselves on this objectivity, of stating just the facts. When a story is broadcast on a news show, the audience does not usually wonder if the story is true, or whether the journalist is lying. We trust journalists to give us objective information that is relevant to our lives. We also trust that this information is true, because journalists are seen as “news specialists.”

Myth, like news, rests on its authority as “truth.” By accepting journalists as “news specialists,” we believe that the news they relay to us is true and, for the most part, unbiased. As news specialists, journalists themselves fulfill a mythic archetype: the messenger, or communicator. In Greek mythology, the God Hermes represented the messenger archetype; the Roman equivalent was the God Mercury. Because we see mythic archetypes as representations of “the true,” the association between messenger and journalist reinforces our belief that journalism is “the truth.”

On closer inspection, the notion that journalism equals truth does not hold up. For instance, because journalists look for certain elements to carry or propel their story, they cannot be considered wholly objective. Just as fiction uses the different or particular to illustrate universal values, so do news stories. Journalists tend mainly to report on stories that have certain elements, or “news values.”

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In other words, journalists, as members of a particular culture, are bound by the “culture grammar” that defines rules of narrative construction, a realization that changes the notion of an “objective” transposing of reality.  New Journalism, for instance, uses the devices of fiction in order to tell a compelling news story.

Regular news reporting is not fiction, but it is a story about reality, rather than reality itself. These constructed stories, drawing their themes from myth, give people a schema for viewing the world and for living their lives. The documentary form of journalism, “the creative treatment of actuality,” uses fictional narration devices more freely and overtly than do straight news stories.
Documentaries are modes of storytelling that use fictional narrative methods. A narrative consists of causally-linked events that occur at a specific place and time. Documentarists rely on several narrative techniques, such as the ‘a day in the life’ format, the ‘problem – solution’ format, and the ‘journey to discovery.’

News and documentary photography effectively record the texture of current experience, and invest that experience with meaning. Photographs, as stated earlier, are symbolic narratives. But in order for these symbolic narratives to remain effective, the photographs must remain current.

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Science Photography and Truth
Photography is not only used by journalists and artists, however. Scientists also make wide use of photography’s various applications. Science and truth have a long association, and the modern era was in part defined by a belief in science’s ability to objectively discover absolute truths. Currently, science does not claim to discover final truths, yet scientists are often seen as unquestionable authorities in our technology-driven culture, very similar to the earlier unquestionable authorities of religion. Journalists actually contribute to this image, strengthening the connection between science and authority. Journalists tend to hold scientists in high esteem, and they promote scientists as superstars, super geniuses, or as brilliant eccentrics who operate outside the realm of normal human activity. Science has had a long association with religion.
Science and religion generally also share a belief that truth is found or revealed, rather than made, as postmodernists believe. Yet a principal difference between science and religion lies in the search for truth. The common quest of both science and religion is the search for truth and understanding, but religion relies on faith whereas science relies on proof obtained through observation and experimentation.

We put our faith in our scientists, not only because of our belief in the truth of mythological archetypes, but also because science represents the search for truth. We often rely on journalists, our messengers or scribes, to interpret this knowledge for us.

Science and the visual arts have much in common. Both science and the visual arts have an interest in color and light, and both attempt to achieve understanding derived from observation.

Science and the arts may tend to flourish together because practitioners from each field draw from one another for inspiration. Not only can photography make traditionally dull science topics seem artistic, but photography can also make such topics seem exciting. Photography can expand the audience for science by making science both more interesting and accessible.

Just as journalists and scientists disagree on the definition of truth, they also disagree on how to communicate truth. Many scientists object to the literary devices journalists employ in telling a story, for instance. Journalists strive to capture the essence of the science, but scientists expect the “nuts and bolts” of their findings to be expressed as well.

In order for a journalist to have his story read by the public, he must make that story appealing and interesting. Photography aides in this process, giving the public clear pictures to accompany and illustrate the text.

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Truth and Beauty
One quality of art and photography that is associated with truth is the representation of beauty. One reason beauty and truth are linked is because of beauty’s connection to myth through archetypal patterns. Archetypes can be geometric patterns (such as circles, spheres and triangles) that occur naturally in nature. Artists often use these patterns as signifiers or clues of deeper meaning. Religious art often relies on symbols and patterns to convey meaning and truth. Beauty similarly is associated to truth due to its archetypal representation of order and form. This emphasis on order coincides with the Platonic ideal of beauty, which is based on unity, regularity and simplicity. Plato stated that every living person is in the process of becoming, of moving toward the ideal. The more “beautiful” something is, the more it will be seen as closer to the ideal. The idea that beauty is associated with truth and meaning has long been a basic belief of scientific philosophy.

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The Sublime and the Beautiful
The Kantian idea of the sublime appears at first glance to be the antithesis of Platonic beauty. Beauty is achievable, pleasurable, and evokes feeling of peace and contentment. The sublime, rather than the opposite of beauty, is instead a higher, less restful form of appreciation. Beauty is calm and surety; the feeling of truth found. The sublime is awe and exhilaration, but also a restless feeling of the need to achieve understanding. The sublime is often connected to beauty, however. Beauty acts as a base from which the sublime is reached.
Perhaps what motivates “a search after the beautiful,” or the true, is the sense of the sublime that follows from an appreciation of the beautiful. As stated previously, beauty promotes feelings of peace and satisfaction, of truth found, whereas the sublime promotes the need to search for truth.

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Beauty and Photography
Beauty is a common theme in science, art, literature and journalism. All these modes of inquiry seek to uncover "truth," and beauty is a way for them to “prove” they were successful in their search. But just as beauty does not always equal scientific truth, it does not define other truths either. The same applies to photographs – beautiful pictures are not inherently any more true than ugly ones.
In fact, many beautiful photographs are manipulated, showing a falsified vision of reality. And just as with scientific theories, belief affects whether we see a photograph as beautiful or not.

A photographer who prefers to represent beauty is often seen as someone who irresponsibly depicts the world through rose- colored glasses. National Geographic, for instance, has been accused of only presenting the sunnier side of life due to its preference for strikingly beautiful images. Despite the belief that beauty is a sign of irresponsibility or decadence, most successful documentary photographs can still be considered beautiful in form, even when the subject matter (the content) is ugly. The horror of war is, unfortunately, an undeniable truth about the history of human existence.

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In photography, as in other forms of art, simply a beautiful form is not enough to suggest truth or to reveal meaning.

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In photography, as in other forms of art, simply a beautiful form is not enough to suggest truth or to reveal meaning. If photographers take a picture simply because the image looks nice, the end result may often be banal rather than beautiful.

A dramatic or beautiful picture will catch the eye, but it often won’t engage the mind unless it is placed in context. This is why, according to Adams, photographers and other artists need a firm grounding in the history of their art to be successful. To be able to reveal meaning in new ways, one must know how meaning has been revealed in the past.

Beauty does not guarantee either truth or meaning. Beauty, like myth, depends on what we as a community believe. Despite the fact that order and symmetry define beauty, we may not acknowledge the ‘beauty’ of an object unless we are willing or ready to do so. This ties our sense of the beautiful inexorably to culture. Postmodern art highlights this culturally-dependant quality of beauty to prove how truth is product of culture. As stated previously, the idea that truth is defined by culture is the position of postmodernist philosophy.

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Beauty in Aesthetic Philosophy
Modern philosophical theories reflect on the issues of beauty and belief, as well as the issues of symbolism and meaning. One of the differences between modernism and postmodernism has to do with the artistic representation of the sublime. As stated above, the sublime is characterized by boundlessness and formlessness. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to represent the concept of the sublime in a work of art. We can conceptualize the infinitely great and the infinitely small, but all of our attempts to describe or represent such concepts seem inadequate.

In modernism, art involves both the beautiful and the sublime. In postmodern art, however, beauty is eschewed entirely as an outdated, ineffective model. When you consider that postmodernists believe that chaos ultimately wins out over order, this makes perfect sense.

Postmodernism looks down on beauty as nostalgia, or at least as a man-made construct; beauty is, after all, based on belief. Postmodernism instead seeks new forms of presentation, not for enjoyment, but as a means of expressing the unpresentable, the sublime. Postmodernism may have determined its own dead end by stating that the surface is everything. It is no wonder that postmodernism is often characterized by malaise or nihilism; why bother giving anything more than a cursory glance if there is no sense of deeper meaning? Without the symbols of myth, such as beauty, it is possible that a sense of the sublime may never be achieved, and it is the sublime that often prompts a need to search for deeper understanding.

Postmodernism has touched upon most of the fields in the liberal arts, and photography as been especially affected. Both modern and postmodern art promote the idea that images must be decoded. In modernism, this decoding is achieved by understanding a language of symbols or signs that indicate deeper meanings. Postmodernism says photographs need to be decoded according to their relationships to other factors within the culture. Whereas modernism treats a photograph as an image containing meaning, postmodernism sees a photograph as a cultural object.

Photography, as stated previously, is a manipulated medium, despite the protestations by news photographers of complete objectivity. The photographer chooses his subjects, frames his pictures, and alters the appearance of the photograph in the darkroom. He creates according to his own personal vision and aesthetic taste. This fact alone would seem to negate the postmodernist viewpoint, however, postmodernists claim that which we take as individual taste is a product of culture, any subjective aspects photographers believe they have infused in a photograph are really only borrowed from a pre-existing pool of ideas.

Although the postmodernist viewpoint currently prevails in most of the critical literature on photography, I believe there is still room for some of the tenets of modernism in current photographic thinking. The continued efficacy and resonance of mythic archetypes and themes throughout society would seem to indicate that symbols are effective in conveying meaning. The fact that new photographic images continue to capture our interest and even astonish and amaze us seems to suggest that the malaise postmodernists wallow in is not wholly reflective of the attitude expressed by the general public. Originality, genius, and individuality are still possible within a society of shared beliefs, influences and experiences. After all, as stated previously, art often means different things to different people. Although beauty has always been associated with form, order, and symmetry, individual understandings or representations of beauty vary. While the existence of myths suggests there are inherent, universal aspects of human understanding, there are enough differences among us to ensure we may never reach the dead end that postmodernists claim we have already crashed into.

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Part of our trust in photography stems from our unconscious faith in mythic archetypes as universal truths.

Conclusion
Photographic truth, like all other truths, depends on culture, belief, history, understanding, and human nature. There are truths that change, while others remain constant. The truths that remain constant will most likely reflect basic, unchanging facets of human life, such as of nature and biology, or of how to best cope with the demands of living in society. These unchanging facets are often related through mythic archetypes, and these archetypes are often featured in art works that endure over time. These works of art endure because they capture aspects of our own experiences, perceptions, attitudes and intentions. If they did not fairly reflect our own lives, they probably would not last.
But even these unchanging truths are under constant reconsideration. Reality is not static, it is in constant flux, undergoing revision as new aspects of life continually come to light.
Part of our trust in photography stems from our unconscious faith in mythic archetypes as universal truths. Myth is a symbolic language reflecting conditions inherent in human culture, and it affects how we see the world and tells us how we should conduct our lives. Although unacknowledged by the conscious mind, myths influence our ideas of what is “true” and guide us down the path toward understanding.
Photography speaks in an extremely powerful symbolic language, a language that derives power from its non-verbal, almost subconscious quality. Although news and documentary photographs are not formally considered “artistic” photographs, they best perform the same function as art: by choosing and selecting which aspects of reality to highlight and address, they do away with the trivia and chaff of the day-to-day, and show us in many ways how life may be led and understood. Through manipulation, they reveal truth, or at least, what the photographer perceives to be truth.
Our understanding of reality depends on a knowledge and awareness of both the internal and external world. Photography, as both a reflection and a manipulation of reality, is likewise viewed and judged by that vision. It is only by understanding why photography is so closely aligned with truth that we can come to comprehend our own deep-rooted faith in its authenticity.

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