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\title{Trust in Photographic Presentation}
\author{Matthew Gray}
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\section*{Introduction}

Photography has long been characterized as a medium that does not lie.
While framing has always been an issue with photos, it has generally
been treated as though a photorealistic image must represent,
unchanged, an image of reality.

\par

For the vast majority of photographs, stills, film and video, this is
the case.  Even more so, this perception is enhanced because the
technology typically available to the average person has enforced
this.  That is, point-and-shoot cameras, video cameras and the like do
present a fairly factual representation of reality.  For many popular
media sources, this is not the case however.  As technology improves,
it ceases to be the case for the average person as well.

\section*{The Problem}

As it becomes apparent that images are not always true reflections of
reality, it is necassary to have some way of evaluating their
veracity.  Most people do not have the time, mental energy, or
capability to effectively verify the nature of even a small fraction
of the images they are regularly presented.

\par

One alternative would be to ignore these images altogether.  This
might be effective if any substantial fraction of the images
encountered were regularly found to be false, but since the majority
are actually fair reflections of reality, most are hesitant to discard
them wholesale.

\par

Another approach, sometimes consciously used, more often naively used,
is to treat all images as real, and hope that altered images either
don't exist, or can be safely ignored.  This reasoning, though common,
has some serious problems with the increasing ubiquity of such dubious
images.

\section*{Trust}

The solution to this problem is the obvious one.  As with other
deformable media, such as the spoken word, witten word, paintings and
illustrations, the veracity of the content is judged based on trust in
the source and the context.

\par

While in many ways, this is obvious, there are some subtleties in the
case of images.  In general, the ammount of trust assigned to a source
is not only a function of the trust in the source and the context, but
also affected by the perceived effort required to perform the deceit.
That is, an untrusted source would be expected to lie verbally,
because it is easy to do so.  Lying with an image, however, would be
less expected unless there was an easily assignable motive, because
creating deceiving images is perceived as difficult (and in the past,
has been).

\par

Due to this perception of difficulty in creating a false image, the
general behavior is to offer full trust, even if the same source might
not be trusted in other, more easily alterable media.  Even more so,
it is a common beleif that an altered image will be ``obvious'', as a
blatant lie might be.  Further, even obviously retouched or otherwise
modified images, are often still considered ``true'', if they come
from a trusted source, such as certain national media sources.

\par

In general, despite the desire to use a traditional framework of trust
to evaluate images, people typically fall into the extreme cases of
trusting all images, except the patently obvious deceits (Weekly World
News), or distrusting all images (and often all other media).

\section*{Conclusion}

Photographic (and photorealistic) images have historically been hard
to convincingly modify.  This history has caused people to approach
images with far less skepticism than they approach other media.
Digital imaging technologies have so eased the difficulty of modifying
images so quickly, that people have not had time to adjust their
skepticism.  Additionally, these rapid changes in capability have
occured faster than people have been able to adjust their patterns of
trust.  This has resulted in much extremism in trust or lack thereof,
in the case of images.

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