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7 MIN · Module

The camera's claim to truth

Why audiences presume a photograph shows what happened, how selection and framing shape that impression, and what the presumption obliges you to do.

Every picture is a choice

A photograph arrives with a presumption attached. Before anyone reads the caption, the viewer assumes the camera was there, that the scene happened, and that it looked more or less like this. Nobody granted you that presumption personally. You inherit it from more than a century of photographs used as evidence in newspapers, in official records, in family albums and…

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