5 ideas
In 1855 Roger Fenton took two photographs of the same Crimean ravine, one with cannonballs scattered on the road and one with the road bare. Susan Sontag had asserted he staged the scene by adding the balls.
A photograph is neither true nor false. Only the statements attached to it, such as captions, dates, names and claims about causes, can be true or false. The same image can support opposite accounts depending on the words beside it, so verifying a picture really means investigating facts outside the frame.
Viewers do not read a photograph and then form beliefs. Their existing beliefs decide what they think the photograph shows, which details they notice and what they take it to prove. This is why people with opposed politics can look at the same image, each find confirmation, and each accuse the other of misreading it.
At Abu Ghraib, MP Sabrina Harman was photographed grinning with a thumbs-up over the corpse of Manadel al-Jamadi, a detainee who died during a CIA interrogation. The smile was read everywhere as proof of sadistic pleasure. Morris shows that Harman was taking her own photographs to document what she suspected was a cover-up of the killing, and that her expression was a reflexive camera smile, not evidence of what she felt.
Every photograph involves decisions: where to stand, what to frame out, when to press the shutter, which print to publish. Scandals over staging, such as Arthur Rothstein moving a cow skull across the Dakota Badlands for the FSA, or duplicate shots of a toy in Lebanese rubble in 2006, treat one kind of intervention as fraud while ignoring these unavoidable ones. The useful question is whether the claims made about the image are false, not whether the photographer touched the scene.