In 1984, when photographers were still using film, I began exploring the early use of computers to undetectably modify photographs. In an article in The New York Times Magazine I wrote that “in the not-too-distant future, realistic-looking images will probably have to be labeled, like words, as either fiction or nonfiction, because it may be impossible to tell them apart. We may have to rely on the image maker, and not the image, to tell us into which category certain pictures fall.”

This was two years after National Geographic, at the dawn of the digital image revolution, had modified a photograph of the pyramids of Giza so that it would better fit on its cover, using a computer to shift one pyramid closer to the other. The magazine’s editor defended the alteration, viewing it not as a falsification but, as I wrote then, “merely the establishment of a new point of view, as if the photographer had been retroactively moved a few feet to one side.” I was astonished. It seemed to me that the magazine had just introduced to photography a concept from science fiction—virtual time travel—as if revisiting a scene and photographing it again.

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Twentieth-century photographers, acting as witnesses and interpreters of issues and events, were able at times to provoke widespread discussions resulting in profound societal change. Had they not been able to do so, their coverage of wars, famines, racial injustice and environmental degradation would have verged on the voyeuristic and obscene.

It is now a different moment. The photograph no longer is perceived as automatically credible, the result of a mechanical recording process expressed as “the camera never lies.” Photographs are widely viewed now as constructs, malleable interpretations of the real that are largely subjective and easily modifiable by software. They are produced by the billions, without sufficient context provided to shape their meanings. And they are often used to illustrate preconceptions, to be shared and “liked,” rather than to explore that which may be unknown.

Furthermore, these images are now made in an era brimming with assertions of alternative facts, fake news, and post-truth, making it even more difficult for photographs to emerge that manage to redirect the societal focus. For example, despite the massive problems confronting society, very few iconic photographs exist since 2001 and the September 11 attacks. The 2015 photograph of Alan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned, is one of the rare exceptions…

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