Through the looking glass

"(Belief in) the accuracy of information — in which the photographic image has long played a role as evidence — has been a key driving force behind the sharing of knowledge and our understanding of world events and the people who inhabit it. Yet history teaches us that photography has, from its very beginnings, been a medium prone to manipulation and falsification. Every image stems from a multitude of choices — framing, perspective, selection, context, dissemination — which complicate, fragment and subjectively transform the seemingly direct link between the image and reality. Today, the emergence of computational images—generated or transformed by algorithms—makes this relationship more tenuous than ever. At a time when an image can be fabricated without any reference to the real world, when the plausible can take the place of the true, we must re-examine the foundations of our trust. It is not a question of abandoning images, but of learning to look at them differently: to identify the conditions of their production, to question their uses, narratives and effects, and even to accept uncertainty. Faced with this new ecology of images, we must now learn to speculate, to doubt and to construct a new shared territory of visual interpretation.”