Saying that photography lies is almost a cliché, yet it still ignites heated debates every time society needs to rely on an image to validate history.
From Nicéphore Niépce’s first exposure on bitumen to the latest war report captured with a smartphone, nearly two centuries of technical advances, aesthetic conquests, and ethical dilemmas have passed.
The dilemma of neutrality persists because every shutter click condenses multiple layers of interpretation: the device’s, the photographer’s, the social context’s, and, of course, the viewer’s. These layers overlap like pigments in an old oil painting, turning the aspiration of objectivity into a tempting but perhaps impossible chimera.
To approach neutrality, one would first have to assume that the camera works like a cold mirror, a tool that records light without interference. This idea triumphed in the 19th century when photography was embraced by the press as a guarantor of truth, in contrast to the suspicion that hung over engraving and lithography. However, even the pioneers manipulated scenes. Roger Fenton, famous for his work in the Crimean War, rearranged cannonballs to dramatize the destruction in the Valley of Death. His contemporary O. G. Rejlander assembled thirty negatives to compose a Victorian version of The School of Athens. The supposed mechanical coldness soon revealed itself to be permeable to the will of meaning. The device does not perform miracles; it merely translates a field of light into chemical or digital language, and all translation involves loss, emphasis, and silences.
Fast-forward a century and a half to the era of CMOS sensors, and the conversation shifts from the darkroom to the algorithm. HDR mode decides for you how the sky should look, noise reduction sacrifices texture for cleanliness, and artificial intelligence fills in dead pixels with plausible guesses. The photographer can disable auto settings, but can never fully escape: even in RAW, there are lens curvatures, Bayer patterns, and white balance defaults. The camera is no longer a simple dark box; it’s a microcomputer that interprets before displaying. To say photography is objective would be to claim that this technical process is devoid of intention, which is false because all engineering is built upon cultural and commercial priorities. Every factory preset carries an implicit philosophy about what constitutes natural color, flattering skin tones, or acceptable contrast.
At this point, it’s helpful to separate two planes. One is referential objectivity, the ability of a photo to certify that something was in front of the lens at a specific moment. The other is interpretive objectivity, the ability to describe that something without bias. The first remains relatively firm: even with edits, there is always an ontological trace, a pulse of reality. The second collapses as soon as the human gaze enters the equation. A slight change in angle can empower or diminish a politician, a wide lens can caricature a face, and a telephoto can compress depth and suggest crowds where none exist. Manipulation can be as subtle as a long exposure that erases pedestrians to present an empty avenue, or as obvious as a Photoshop clone tool that removes cables and protest signs.
Subjectivity is not just ideological bias. It also encompasses the photographer’s sensory biography. Lived experiences shape a preference for certain colors, a hunger for specific textures, a narrative appetite. Eugène Atget wandered Paris at dawn not just for practical reasons but because that twilight matched his nostalgia for a city in flux. Diane Arbus approached her subjects with the hunger of someone complicit in marginality. Sebastião Salgado imbues his reports with a tonal grandiloquence that reflects both his background in economics and his fascination with epic drama. Even if two photographers stood on the same street corner with identical cameras, they would shoot at different moments, select different frames, and therefore construct divergent stories. Neutrality vanishes in the blink of an eye.
Yet giving up on objectivity does not mean embracing absolute relativism. There are degrees of rigor, verification protocols, and ethical codes that contain bias so it does not devour a medium’s credibility. A professional photojournalist knows the rules: do not delay a shot so a subject can adjust their pose, do not add smoke to intensify chaos, do not use dramatic filters that alter the original light. Editors demand metadata, moderate contrast, and a prohibition against pixel-level manipulation. Still, that discipline has become porous in the jungle of social media, where narrative efficiency often trumps verification. A visual meme spreads like wildfire because it encapsulates collective fear in a single metaphor. The risk is that an overabundance of images erodes viewers’ patience to investigate sources. They end up accepting any frame that confirms their biases, while doubting anything that challenges them.
The idea of neutrality thus enters its political dimension. Can photography take a stance without becoming propaganda? The answer becomes complex once we understand that any representation of the world involves selection. Immerse yourself in Josef Koudelka’s work on the Prague invasion, and you’ll see a wristwatch showing 12:15 against a backdrop of Soviet tanks. That watch, centered in the frame, turns the photo into forensic evidence of the moment hope was shattered. Koudelka didn’t fabricate the scene, but he found a symbol to condense it. He made journalism and poetry at once. The record does not lie, though it’s not neutral: it chooses an eloquent icon that shapes a reading. A neutral image might have shown a nondescript façade with soldiers, but it would not have resonated in collective memory.
On the opposite end, scientific photography is often seen as a bastion of objectivity. A telescope capturing the Orion Nebula or a microscope revealing cell division seems free of aesthetic will. Yet even here, interpretation exists. The visible spectrum is color-coded based on wavelength, histograms are stretched to highlight contrasts, and thermal maps translate data into legible color scales. When NASA releases the first image of an exoplanet, it selects a combination of filters that aids understanding, not necessarily a literal representation. Thus, even the most quantitative fields use visual criteria that appeal to human sensitivity.
It’s paradoxical that the more aware the public becomes of manipulation, the more it trusts certain formats. A frontal portrait with soft light establishes an implicit pact of sincerity, perhaps because it evokes police documentation or ID card traditions. A landscape with a perfectly level horizon suggests balance, stability, geographical rigor. These conventions are effective because they become psychological shortcuts; we don’t need to scrutinize every detail, we just recognize the visual grammar. The problem arises when content creators exploit these shortcuts for dubious ends. A striking example is the deepfake, capable of inserting a politician’s face into a speech they never gave. Technically, the video appears coherent. Ethically, the viewer is left exposed, forced to distrust their own intuition.
So how do we navigate this sea of subjectivities? Some advocate for a return to explicit authorship: visible signatures, statements of intent, transparent editing processes. Others push for visual literacy, a pedagogy that teaches how to spot a suspicious shadow gradient or encourages questioning the shooting angle. Still others invoke blockchain technology to register the digital DNA of each file and detect post-edit alterations. No measure will eradicate subjectivity because every image is anchored to a body and a system of beliefs. What can be achieved is an ethics of position: recognizing the place from which one looks, the limitations that shape that gaze, and the responsibility of sharing it.
This discussion is not trivial because it touches the very notion of truth in the information age. If every side claims the opponent’s photo is manipulated, we risk falling into total cynicism, where proof and rumor are treated as equals. The solution, paradoxically, might be to embrace subjectivity as an ethical component. To show not only the result but also the process: contact sheets, discarded versions, the story of how the final frame was chosen. To turn transparency into added value. In documentary practice, there are already approaches that include contact sheets, full shot sequences, and field notes in exhibitions. This allows the viewer to understand that the photo is the child of methodical doubt, not of omniscience.
There is also a passionate defense of subjectivity as a creative force. Photography is not a mere witness; it is a language capable of questioning reality and proposing metaphors. If we try to neutralize it, we risk sterilizing its critical power. A portrait by Zanele Muholi asserts Blackness as a performative act, a landscape by Nadav Kander turns the Yangtze River into an allegory of industrial damage. Their subjectivity does not obscure but illuminates. It demands interpretive effort from the viewer and a stance. Perhaps that’s the key: replacing the dream of neutrality with the practice of honesty. Stating where one speaks from, for what purpose, and for whom.
In the end, the question of whether photography can be neutral resolves into a more productive one: why would we want it to be neutral? The quest for objectivity served as an epistemological engine in the 19th century, helped establish photojournalism, and provided documentary evidence to the legal system. But in the 21st century, saturated with images and aware of their malleability, perhaps we need something different: photography that admits its point of view yet still aspires to clarity. That combines factual rigor with imagination, that knows how to distinguish between metaphor and deception. The camera will keep recording light, but the responsibility of reading that light falls on humans, who must decide how much to trust and how much to question. Neutrality sounds like asepsis, like silence, like an impossible balance on a tightrope. Better to accept the instability and turn it into a compass. That way, photography can aspire not to be neutral, but to be meaningful and, at its best, just.
