To some photographers, the new age of photographic uncertainty is an unsettling development. "My work is about witnessing my time and events," says Ken Light, a veteran photojournalist and a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. "My career as a photographer has been based on seeing America through a lens that is critical of institutions and of the culture." Among other things, Light has photographed the Texas death row, the poverty-stricken Mississippi Delta, and migrant workers crossing the Mexican-American border. His pictures are powerful precisely because they're credible, because they're real. If you're a supporter of the death penalty, you can read 10,000 words on the horror and loneliness of death row and still come away unmoved, dismissing the whole thing as one subjective writer's bluster. Stubborn as you might be, though, perhaps just this one Ken Light picture of a 21-year-old waiting for execution will jar you from your settled view. This is what attracts Light to photography. It's difficult to shake criticism that comes through a camera, he says, because "people sense a deeper truth in photographs" than they do in other media.

But Light worries that the truth we see in photographs will diminish in a digital age. He has two nightmares: First, that fake pictures will be mistaken for true pictures, rattling the political discourse. But a scarier proposition for him is that, in the long run, people will start to ignore real pictures as phonies. When every picture is suspect, all pictures are dismissible, Light fears, and photography's unique power to criticize will decline.

Light recently found himself at the center of his first nightmare. An old picture he took -- a 1971 shot of John Kerry at an antiwar rally in Mineola, N.Y. -- was swiped from the Web site of Corbis, Light's photo agency, and seamlessly stitched with another picture from Corbis, photographer Owen Franken's 1972 photograph of Jane Fonda at a rally in Miami Beach, Fla. Nobody knows who did it, but whoever it was had a good eye for doctoring. The composite photo, showing a thoughtful, appreciative Kerry next to a fired-up Fonda, was given a border, a headline, a caption and an Associated Press credit; it looks like an authentic newspaper clipping showing Kerry closely associated with Hanoi Jane, a woman hated by many of the veterans who support Kerry.

The composite image spread around the Internet with lightning speed, even catching the attention of some in the media; on Feb. 13, the New York Times reported its existence, describing the picture in detail but noting that its origins were "unclear." It didn't take long for Light, Franken and sites like Snopes.com -- dedicated to debunking Internet rumors -- to show that the picture was fake. Eventually, the record was set straight. As Light later wrote in the Washington Post, "The Internet has come as close as it gets to a correction. If you use a search engine to look for my Kerry picture now, you'll find the hoax explanations before you see the photo itself." But it still took some time to put things right, and perhaps too much time -- what if the picture was found online just weeks before the election? Fred Ritchin, of NYU, has a specific case in mind: "Seriously, what if there's a picture of one or another political candidate in bed with a woman who's not his wife two days before the election?" he asks. What if its authenticity was impossible to determine quickly? (Ken Light still has the original negative of his Kerry photo, but modern photographs, taken on digital cameras, might not provide this handy way of proving which is really the "original" picture.) How would society deal with such a political earthquake?

If a doctored photo ever does lead to the defeat of a political candidate or some other disaster -- puts the wrong guy in jail, say -- one immediate consequence might be a quick decline in the trust we have in pictures. And to Light and Ritchin, people in awe of the power of photography, this is a terrifying thing. In the absence of trustworthy photos, says Ritchin, "The institutions in power will increase their power." Then he adds, "Look at Rodney King. For years and years there was brutality in the LAPD. It wasn't until the video came out that we all knew about it, because we saw it." Light echoes that idea. "It's one thing when it's a silly photo, but when it's massacres, executions, all those things, it becomes very dangerous. How do newspapers know when they see something if it's real or not? Let's say I'm at a newspaper and I get this picture of this cop beating up this guy, which could be a great picture. But what if it isn't real? Should I run it?"

There are already signs that our trust in pictures is slipping away. People used to get fooled all the time by nude pictures of celebrities online, says Ed Lake, also known as the Fake Detective, a man who dedicates much of his time to pinning down the fakery behind purported naughty pictures of people like Gillian Anderson and Sarah Michelle Gellar. (Lake was the subject of an entertaining profile in Wired recently, titled "These Are Definitely Not Scully's Breasts.") Now, Lake says, "Most of the e-mail I get is about real pictures. Now they automatically think it's fake." David Mikkelson, who, with his wife, Barbara, runs Snopes, said something similar. Many times when people ask Snopes to review photos, the pictures turn out to be real, Mikkelson says. What's actually wrong with the pictures are the descriptions that are added on to them online, sometimes out of malice but mostly just as a guess. "The pictures were thrown out on the Internet and people have no idea what they mean, so they just make up a description," he says.

While photographers like Light and Ritchin aren't pleased that the Internet has caused the public to question every picture, there are some photographers who would welcome the public's wary eye when it comes to pictures. For too long, these photographers say, pictures have been burdened by a need to provide a level of fidelity with the real world that is actually beyond their reach; pictures need to be liberated from this constraint, they plead. "Photography is only the medium that is a witness to itself," says Pedro Meyer, a celebrated Mexican photographer who leads a movement that embraces, rather than eschews, digital manipulation. "Photographs say, 'You can trust me because I am.' What other medium does that?"

Meyer would like photographs to be treated like any other bit of information -- in an ideal world photos would be given as much credence as words. "We don't trust words because they're words, but we trust pictures because they're pictures," Meyer said in an interview with Wired several years ago. "That's crazy. It's our responsibility to investigate the truth, to approach images with care and caution. People need to realize that an image is not a representation of reality."

Meyer is remarkably sanguine in the face of Ritchin's nightmare scenario -- how will we ever know a massacre has occurred if we don't have believable photographic proof? "If you take my logic of using photographs along the same line of thought as using words, then look how easy it becomes," he says. "What do you do with text? You have to have other sources to confirm that something happened; if you don't have other sources to confirm something, you can't conclude it happened. Now enter into the picture this fact -- over the last 12 months there have been more cellphones with cameras sold than all other cameras, digital or analog combined. Cameras are becoming ubiquitous. We have the possibility for the first time to cross-reference everything, something that was never done before. It doesn't matter if the picture is a shitty little picture, it's a reference." And if you have enough references, it doesn't matter if one person doctors an image; if a hundred -- or maybe a thousand -- cellphones say a massacre occurred, it probably happened.

In a cross-referenced, constantly photographed world -- a thing that might scare you but that is probably becoming inevitable -- we would probably have better proof of what actually happened in an important event than we do today, Meyer says. A single photographic image is important, Meyer says, but we can't rely on it to tell a whole story. The Rodney King video was important, but we should note that it did not in fact prove anything about the LAPD. In court, the police officers accused of beating King were acquitted, despite the video. The video may have been horrific, but jurors, at least, seemed to decide that it didn't convey the whole truth of what occurred that night. The video was just one slice of reality; the jury seems to have considered other things at least as important as the pictures -- what happened before the camera was snapped on, what happened outside of the camera's field of view, what happened in people's minds.

And in the end, it's perhaps this sense of caution that we need to bring to the mysterious photograph of Lance Cpl. Boudreaux. As Snopes' Mikkelson says, "Whether or not the photographs are real in a physical sense is only part of the story." The rest of the story is what happened outside the frame, what the Marine and the boys and whoever took the picture (whichever picture is real) were thinking at the time. Why are they there, near that hut? Why is the kid in the Real Madrid T-Shirt not as happy as the boy with the sign? Is the whole thing a joke? If so, who is in on the joke? Does one of the boys know what's on the sign? Are the boys being made fun of, or is the soldier, or are we? "You can't know what's going on without knowing the rest of the story," Mikkelson says.

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