Epistemology

Images are interesting because, in the digital world, it’s trivial to alter them, and yet we still tend to treat images—photographs, video—as a kind of proof. If you see a photograph in a news article, most people don’t really stop to ask whether the thing actually happened. The photograph is the thing, or at least it stands in for it. Light hit something, a camera was there, therefore this event occurred. That association feels almost automatic, and it’s been reinforced culturally for a long time.