The Perfect Medium

"These images answer certain people’s hopes and dreams – that they can reconnect with those that are lost, that the deceased are always with us. One example is William H Mumler, the famous spirit photographer who created a picture of Mary Lincoln with the ghost of her deceased husband hovering in the background. At the time, people invested these images with truth. You might imagine they would know better. But photographs are intimately connected with our desire to believe, whether that a person who is gone is still with us or in a particular version of history. I’ve been asked: Haven’t we become skilled at identifying falsified photographs? Aren’t we now less credulous about what we see with our eyes, more suspicious, more sceptical? I think: Yes and no. The falsification of photography didn’t start with Photoshop, it started with photography. At the very beginning, people used photographs to convey false beliefs. They noted from the beginning that you could look at a photograph and form your own interpretation of it – one that might be at complete variance with what the photograph was documenting. Early in the history of photography, people learned that there was slack between the real world and our images of it. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Are we that much smarter now? Within the last decade, Colin Powell appeared before the United Nations as Secretary of State and showed photographs of plants [in Iraq ] that he claimed produced chemical or biological weaponry. On that basis we went to war . Have we really learned anything? When we’re shown an image we tend to let our guard down. People learn how to read critically and think critically, but I don’t believe we learn how to see critically."