all off the ground at one phase of the gallop—but, to the
surprise of the world, only when the feet were bunched
together under the belly. None of the horses photo-
graphed showed the ‘‘hobbyhorse attitude’’—front legs
stretched forward and hind legs backward—so tradi-
tional in painting. The photographs looked absurd
(Newhall 1982, 119)
But absurd or not, the photographs were ac-
cepted as giving a definitive answer; though they
were amazed, people seem not to have accused
Muybridge of doctoring the evidence.
What has so far been said can obviously be gen-
eralized to many other cases. Photography brings us
the truth of the microscopically small, the cosmically
distant, and increasingly, with the passage of time
and the accumulation of images, the more or less
remote past. Correspondence, however, is not the
only test of truth. Philosophers recognize that the
acceptance of propositions as true cannot always fall
back on matching word with object, image with
reality. Sometimes all we have for the vindication
of a proposition is another proposition, or a net-
work of propositions: if the proposition under test
fits in with others already known or taken to be true
we may be confident—up to a point—in accepting it
without empirical confirmation. The test of truth
here iscoherencerather than correspondence.
Coherence is a logical relation and invites the ex-
ploitation of logical properties. A strategy made
famous by Karl Popper hinges on the fact that if
confirmation cannot be achieved, falsification may be.
If we cannot find grounds to conclude that a given image
isa true record of a real scene or event, we can take the
opposite tack and attempt to demonstrate that it could
notbe a true record....The more information there is in an
image, the harder it is to alter without introducing detect-
able inconsistencies....Furthermore, the difficulty of con-
vincing alteration grows exponentially with the variety of
types of visual evidence present....A photographic
manipulator, like a dissembler who weaves a tangled
web of lies and eventually trips himself up, is likely to
be caught by some subtle, overlooked inconsistency
(Mitchell 1992, 31)Between correspondence and coherence, then,
and given the social context in which photography
operates—editors, critics, dealers, publishers, and
archivists, as well as photographers themselves
and the academic and professional institutions
they sustain—it looks as if truth in photography
is, if not definitively established, at least robustly
enough understood to prevent wholesale deception,
in spite of the recent dominance of the digital cam-
era. With suitable provisos about manipulation and
fraud, photography plays a trustworthy role in the
economy of information. It may inspire anxiety as
well as trust: when truth itself is subject to distor-
tion and suppression, the truth-telling powers of
photography can be a threat to those who are
doing the distorting and suppressing. People with
things to hide have reason to fear the truth of
photography, as witness the countless plots that
hinge on the existence of photographic evidence of
adultery or crime.
All this said, photography can make no absolute
claim of fidelity to the real. Radical skepticism is
always possible; at best we can arrive at a close
approximation to the truth about objects, we cannot
grasp it fully or finally. From the notion of the truth
aboutobjects we might move, then, to a considera-
tion of the other side of the coin, the truthforsub-
jects. The individual, after all is the one who will
have to decide, in the end, whether he or she can
trust a given photographic representation, or whet-
her or not to be suspicious of it. If the individual is
compulsive he or she will worry about degrees of
approximation that a more relaxed person would
comfortably let go. If the individual is existentially
engaged he or she may find the whole question of
degrees of approximation irrelevant to involvement
with the content or style of the representation.
Søren Kierkegaard, in hisConcluding Unscienti-
fic Postscript(written in 1846), works out the oppo-
sition between objective and subjective truth in
characteristically existentialist fashion. He is not
so impressed with objective truth, even in photo-
graphy (a daguerreotype studio opened in Copen-
hagen in 1842, but Kierkegaard pointedly declined
the opportunity to have his portrait made). His
target in thePostscriptis theological and aesthetic
truth, but what he says is of more general import.
In objective truth, says Kierkegaard, the empha-
sis is on the ‘‘object to which the knower is
related,’’ but in subjective truth the emphasis is on
‘‘the nature of the individual’s relationship.’’ ‘‘The
objective accent falls on what is said, the subjective
accent on how it is said.’’ He stresses the futility of
a progressive approximation to the truth, and
reverses the usual priorities: instead of trying to
arrive at something given, he starts with something
taken; instead of approximating, he appropriates.
Here is his central formulation: ‘‘An objective
uncertainty held fast in an appropriation-process
of the most passionate inwardness is the truth, the
highest truth attainable for an existing individual’’
(Kierkegaard, 1941). Just such a reversal of prio-
rities is to be found at the heart of the debate about
photographic truth in the twentieth century.PHOTOGRAPHIC ‘‘TRUTH’’