Essay: Icons as Fact, Fiction and Metaphor - Lens Blog - NYTimes.com

Is photography always honest? Where is the line to be drawn between truth and fiction?

Essay: Icons as Fact, Fiction and Metaphor - Lens Blog - NYTimes.com. [See my post on Edgar Martins, too, here.]

Makes me think of Susan Sontag’s On Photography [page 86]:

A fake photograph (one which has been retouched or tampered with, or whose caption is false) falsifies reality. The history of photography could be recapitulated as the struggle between two different imperatives: beautification, which comes from the fine arts, and truth-telling, which is measured not only by a notion of value-free truth, a legacy from the sciences, but by a moralized ideal of truth-telling, adapted from nineteenth-century literary models and from the (then) new profession of independent journalism. Like the post-romantic novelist and the reporter, the photographer was supposed to unmask hypocrisy and combat ignorance.