The Photograph as Evidence – When Can We Trust an Image?
For a long time, it was widely accepted that photography has evidentiary power because what it depicts is not a product of imagination but real, existing phenomena from the external world, captured by the photographer at a specific moment in the past. This belief was not only held by the general public but also formed a fundamental basis for art historical and philosophical discourse about photography. However, numerous examples exist of photographs that have been deliberately altered to misrepresent reality. In the modern era, the rapid spread of digital image-editing tools has made such practices increasingly common. Additionally, the emergence of artificial intelligence has introduced new grounds for skepticism regarding images. To what extent can we trust a photograph? Is such mistrust truly a phenomenon of our time?