The majority of people have seen this picture without realizing it. Photographed on January 20, 2017, from the summit of the Washington Monument, it depicts the National Mall during Donald Trump’s inauguration, with large expanses of space and sparsely populated areas. The same view from Barack Obama’s 2009 ceremony is next to it. The clarity of the contrast is almost unsettling. A press secretary stood in front of the nation and declared that the photograph was incorrect, which was even stranger than the image itself. Some people simply stopped caring about the image, even though it was clear and documented, when a senior official presented “alternative facts.” It seemed like a philosophical as well as political boundary was being crossed at that precise moment.
There has always been an implicit agreement between the photographer and the audience. It is assumed—however naive—that something genuine was captured by the camera. Photographed in California in March 1936, Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother became a symbol of the Depression not because it was staged or altered, but rather because it felt genuine, with a woman’s weariness clearly visible on her face and her kids turning away from the camera. Jacob Riis’s photographs of New York’s tenements and Alexander Gardner’s Civil War photos both relied on the notion that the photographer stood somewhere and saw something, and the image served as proof. This contract may have always been more brittle than most people realized. However, it remained in place for more than a century.
It’s not the image that has changed. It’s the viewers. Demetris Koilalous, a Greek photographer who captured migrants traveling across the Aegean in his series Caesura: The Duration of a Sigh, has talked about ushering in a new era in the arts, one in which the political and the personal must be reexamined in tandem. His images, which show refugees stopping in a fleeting landscape with their personal belongings dangling from trees by the side of the road like migratory birds at rest, have the subdued authority of a true witness. However, in the current environment, it seems that even such images—careful, humanizing, and thoughtful—can be absorbed into conflicting narratives, twisted, disregarded, or just scrolled past.
The frame has always been the philosopher’s issue with photography. Something is missing from every picture. The angle, moment, and crop are all chosen by the photographer. That makes the image authored, not false. The post-truth era has weaponized this reality by persuading a sizable portion of the populace that an image only represents a viewpoint. From “all photographs involve choices” to “therefore no photograph can be trusted” is a significant intellectual leap. However, it’s a leap that is being made more frequently and loudly.
In 1994, Gilles Peress captured images of the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. Directly viewing those images is challenging. They are destined to be. Photojournalism has debated the ethics of bearing witness versus the exploitation of suffering for decades, as well as whether or not we should look at such images at all. The debate has shifted from whether or not to display specific images to whether or not images can display anything at all, which feels novel and a little concerning. In George Orwell’s vision, inconvenient photos would be destroyed by the Ministry of Truth. The modern version doesn’t even try to destroy them. It just says they’re inconvenient and moves on.
It’s difficult to avoid observing a certain level of fatigue developing in the field. Photographers and editors who work in news and documentary photography are creating work of genuine significance, only to see it vanish into the din of social media in a matter of hours. After researching this exact question, a Leiden University scholar came to the conclusion that photography in the post-truth era multiplies truth rather than dissolves it, creating a plurality of conflicting truths. Depending on your point of view, that is either a hopeful or extremely troubling framing.
The witness in the photo has not passed away. Unquestionable authority is what it has lost. It’s debatable whether or not that authority was ever really earned, but in its absence, something unstable takes its place. The picture of those vibrant migrant possessions hanging in a Greek roadside tree, full of lives in transit and unnamed meaning, continues to do what photographs have always done: it invites the viewer to pause, examine, and consider reality. It is no longer guaranteed that the viewer will accept that invitation.
FAQs
1. Can photographs still be trusted as evidence in the post-truth era?
They can, but their authority is no longer unquestioned or universally accepted.
2. What made the 2017 inauguration photograph historically significant?
It was publicly contradicted by officials despite being verifiably accurate.
3. Did photographers always present images objectively?
No — framing, cropping, and timing have always introduced a personal perspective.
4. How has social media changed the impact of documentary photography?
Powerful images now dissolve into noise within hours of publication.
5. What did Leiden University research conclude about photography and truth?
Post-truth photography creates multiple competing truths rather than eliminating truth.
