If the Lik picture is indeed the result of digital tinkering (and the consensus seems to be that it is), I'd say that it unambiguously fails any "truth" metric-- though it might still qualify as truthful in artistic or visionary terms.
We have to consider what constitutes "truth," to start-- and that's too big a topic to really give its due. But generally, philosophers and scholars have included some of the following definitions and qualifications:
- For some, the truth of photography stems from its indexicality. That is, the photographic image exists because a real object existed to be photographed. Unlike paintings or words, the image is not representational, not mediated (though this gets sticky) through some arbitrary sign or code. The image is because reality was, more or less. On these grounds, many photographs qualify as truthful-- but the Lik photo does not. It represents a scene that never existed in actual space. This might qualify as artistry or imagination, both of which are valuable. But the indexicality is lost. The image is mediated through an intentionality that overwhelms the photograph's more primal ontology.
- For others, the above definition is interesting but naive. Yes, photographs have some intrinsic meaning. The word "dog" represents the literal members of the canine species because we as a culture assigned this sign. We decided the word would go with the object, but there is no pure linkage, no absolute tie between signifier and antecedent. The picture of a dog, however, is unmistakable. It communicates effortlessly and does not need some arbitrary system of codes to be identifiable as "dog." We don't need to learn to read the image as we do as word-- we know (at least if we've seen dogs before) what we are looking at it.
But this reasoning is limited. The "reality" of a scene can be editorialized, as the photographer's framing, exposure, and even color decisions will bias the image away from some "objective truth" toward some expressive document that is, at best, mediated by a subjectivity. For example, the Russian filmmaker Kuleshov juxtaposed the same shot of a woman alongside footage of soup, footage of girl playing, and footage of a dead body. The different combinations of course produced different results and interpretations from viewers, leading to the conclusion that the photograph's intrinsic truth value is limited and that context dictates much of our reaction. Similarly, a photographer might choose to use a long lens focus on the speaker at a rally. This choice will dynamically separate the speaker from the background, turning him/her into a clear figure against an ostensible sea of blurry, enthusiastic supports. Of course, the number of supports might only be a couple dozen-- but with the tight framing, compressed sense of depth, and razor-thin depth of field, no one will be able to tell. In short, even though the image is ontologically bound to something real, to a real event, it's value as an autonomous image cannot be rightly described as truthful.
At best, such images represent a truthful account of the subjective experience of the photographer. That is, his/her emotions and reactions provoked his/her decisions while taking the picture. In an idealist sense, this makes photographs wonderful truth documents-- testaments to not only the reality of a moment in time but also the experience of an individual caught within it, a documentary about both an event and the documentary's own making. This sense also applies to the act of looking at a photograph. As Roland Barthes said, a photograph is both what is there and what we bring to it. Many of us are keen enough to separate the two and can be somewhat successful in judging a photograph on semi-objective merits-- but there is also a (possibly unconscious) impulse in all of us (or so this theory goes) that renders some images inexplicably impacting and other images unaccountably drab. So, our perception of "truth" in a photograph applies, in this view, to not only the truth actually captured by the photographic apparatus but also to the truth we perceive in the frame (a weird Shrodinger's Cat moment in continental philosophy-- the image is true until you learn that it isn't, etc.).
At worst, this sort of "subjective truth" can be dismissed as an easy alibi for mercenary photographers and marketers. A framing decision might have as much to do with privileging a distorted reality that befits a client--i.e. the way political nominees are photographed at speeches using the tactic I described above. Juxtapositions can also be used to make a photo more marketable in various ways-- an intention that doesn't reconcile well with the "truth of the experience" argument.
In any case, the Lik picture fails all of these standards because the picture was engineered in a laborious, calculated manner after the fact. This approach has no trace of the subjective truth nor the indexical truth mentioned above.
- In many ways, no photography is true. Consider a long exposure shot of a waterfall. In it, you'd see a smooth, cascading flow that exists NOWHERE in reality. Never in history has that image been true. A scene with water that flows like that cannot be found. It did not exists. It was witnessed by no one. Rather, the image amounts to a kind of time travel, pinching and condensing many instants into one. Nearly all exposures do this to a certain extent, so the linkage to reality that has been trumpeted above is necessarily qualified. Long exposures just exaggerate the effect.
Nonetheless, a long exposure shot of a waterfall is still more intimately bound to reality than a painting of a waterfall. Even if it's imperfect, the indexical argument has merit. To explore it, we could look at critic Jean Epstein. He used the term "photogenie" to describe the essence of cinema, and for him, it was the quality of cinematic motion and lensing. That ineffable instant before a smile breaks, or that silence that lingers before a symphony starts-- these transitions, he said, were the essence of early cinema's hypnotic nature, its ability to turn the quotidian into a spectacle. Like many early film theorists, he waxes poetic in a way that probably overstates the point-- but photographic truth has some relation to this idea. Getting "the shot" is something all photographers appreciate. It might be the way the sun reflects across a landscape for a thirty second interval on a certain day once per year. Or it might be the crisp, revealing facial expression that happenstance and a fast shutter speed conspired to capture. It might be angle at which someone turns their head-- close enough to tease an expression but hidden enough to leave us looking for more details. It can be lots of things-- but it's never something easily repeatable. It's a unique instant, a moment in time that stands apart from the surrounding moments as unique in a way we appreciate. Whatever the case, we like these photographs because they crystalize images that are, for the most part, too fleeting. We find these ephemeral instants beguiling, and we are drawn to the chance to study them, to examine the small truths that commonly evade us. A good picture is one that people don't merely respect the technical skill of but rather that people want to look at.
On these grounds, many photographs qualify as truthful. Lik's work, however, does not. Again, there is no relation to reality. If we assimilate all of the above views, we can say that the truth in photography comes from its ability to both memorialize material reality and also from its ability to transcend the limitations that our own senses impose on our existence in that reality. Lik's work doesn't meet these standards.
Any way I cut it, the probable fact that the image was engineered almost certainly denies the picture any credible value as truthful. As a visionary image or a work of photograph art, sure. But a conversation like this is only worth having if we invest importance in the idea that "truth" and other such concepts have barriers of some sort. We use categories and concepts to organize our conscious interpretations of meaning, so if the borders between categories (i.e. that which is truthful vs. that which is affecting), then certain structures of meaning also become precarious. At that point, you either abandon conversations like this and let each person follow his/her own code, or you advance a qualified definition. There might be better definitions than the above out there, but as far as I can see, most meditations on the matter disqualify Lik from "truth."
