I have often stated that all photographs are lies of omission at best.  This is based upon the fact that a digital sensor does not capture light in anything close to the range of the human eye.  It is possible to use multiple camera sensors and examine a scene with a range that far exceeds the human eye, but the largest assortment of cameras broadly used by the press or general public have such capability.  It is this limitation that dictates a lie of omission when printing an image, displaying it on a monitor or projecting it. Some manipulation of the image is always going to take place.  Since all images we see in print or on monitors are manipulated in some fashion, whether or not we trust the integrity of the image is determined by our faith in the supplier of the image.

The average person taking a picture trusts the camera manufacturer to provide him an image that is as honest as possible.  In reality, most camera manufacturers provide an image that renders an image with believable skin tones, and close to natural looking greens and reds.  This is because most photographs taken by amateurs are of people.  If you take a long exposure in a slot canyon and view it straight from the camera, and it often looks bad.  To correct this, you or the lab technician will notice the picture and manipulate the image so the resulting image will look more like you remember.  Which is the "truthful" final image, the person or the slot canyon.  Both come out eye pleasing and resembling the original scene, but they are not treated the same by the camera. 

Photojournalists get upset when photographs are "manipulated" beyond a certain limit, but the limits they wish to set as their standards have always been arbitrary.  If they choose to enforce a standard, what is going to stop the cleverer ones from adjusting the algorithms in the camera itself so as to render the image into their favorite style?  The customizing tool on the back of my Nikon can be adjusted to make some really bizarre images.  The truth an image depicts is only believable if you believe in the honesty of the person that produced the image, because the image is a lie calculated to approximate the truth.


Ultimately it is up to the viewer to determine whether the image he sees before him tells the truth.  If he is used to seeing only images that have come straight out of a camera or from the lab, the odds are he will place much more faith in the photograph than in a written description of that same event.  Neither one is an absolute truth, both can be highly manipulated to fulfill an agenda, but the average person trusts photographs more than they should.