Truth claim (photography)

Levinson suggests that icons have a powerful effect on individuals, particularly the "direct image" due to the "sheer ease and sensual satisfaction" of viewing it.[8]

Gunning attributes the human fascination with photographs with a sense of the relationship between photography and reality, though he claims that the "perceptual richness and nearly infinite detail" of the image itself is more significant than a knowledge of its indexicality. He cites Bazin's idea that photography has an "irrational power to bear away our faith."[9]

Further, Susan Sontag relates the belief in a photograph's ability to capture 'reality' to the development of certain human practices. Since a picture confers on events "a kind of immortality (and importance) it would never otherwise have enjoyed,"[10] she explains, the act of taking photographs has become essential to the experience of world travel. The possibility of 'true' photographs leads to a compulsion to "[convert] experience into an image" to "make real what one is experiencing."[11]

David Croteau and William Hoynes suggest that the prevalence of photographic images has blurred the distinction between image and reality, referring to pseudo-events, in Daniel Boorstin's words – such as press conferences, televised political debates, or 'photo opportunities' - that exist only to create images.[12]

Further, Neil Postman argues that the photograph has redefined society's understanding of information and truth: "Truth is in the seeing, not in the thinking."[13] Postman suggests that the proliferation of photography led to the replacement of language with images as "our dominant means for constructing, understanding, and testing reality".[14]

Sontag shares this view, suggesting that "the 'realistic' view of the world compatible with bureaucracy redefines knowledge as techniques of information.[15]

In Sontag's view, a consequence of photography becoming a primary means for understanding reality is the emergence of "bureaucratic cataloguing". She claims that photography's perceived ability to give information results in the bureaucratic organization of modern states. Institutions of control, such as the police, are able to survey and control "increasingly mobile populations" through photographic documents, such as passports or identity cards.[16]

Sontag also argues that through repeatedly capturing and viewing reality through photographs, their subjects can become less real. She claims that "aesthetic distance seems built into the very experience of looking at photographs," and also that the sheer volume of horrific images throughout the world has produced a "familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem more ordinary – making it appear familiar, remote … inevitable".[17]

Sontag's view is akin to Jean Baudrillard's theory of 'hyperreality', where "reality itself founders" as a result of an endless "reduplication of the real" via media such as photography.[18] He claims that the possibility of infinite identical objects creates a "relationship of equivalence, of indifference,"...leading to the "extinction of the original."[19]

Levinson suggests that the digitisation of photography undermines "the very reliability of the photograph as mute, unbiased witness of reality"[20] because of the fallibility of technological manipulation and the potential for human refinement of production.[21]

Lev Manovich likewise questions the indexical identity of motion pictures, rather labelling cinema a subgenre of painting, since it is possible to digitally modify frames, generate photorealistic images entirely using 3-D computer animation, and "...to cut, bend, stretch and stitch digitised film images into something which has perfect photographic credibility, although it was never actually filmed."[6]

It has also been argued that digital photographs inevitably lack indexicality, based on an understanding of "crucial distinctions between the analogue and the digital" in the way they record 'reality'.[22] For instance, Frosh describes photographs as "codes without a message" – "repurposable visual content made of malleable info-pixels."[23]

Gunning alternatively argues that digital photography, the process of encoding data about light in a matrix of numbers, is indexically determined by objects outside of the camera like chemical photography.[4]

Likewise, Martin Lister claims that even with a digital camera, "The images produced are rendered photo-realistic, they borrow photography's currency, its deeply historical 'reality effect', simply in order to have meaning."[22]