While the visual authority of the photograph is now increasingly undermined by the wizardry of digital technology, the 'truthfulness of facts' in a photograph has always been presumed to reside in its verisimilitude. Ever since Paul Delaroche purportedly

While the visual authority of the photograph is now increasingly undermined by the wizardry of digital technology, the 'truthfulness of facts' in a photograph has always been presumed to reside in its verisimilitude. Ever since Paul Delaroche purportedly exclaimed, 'From today, painting is dead,' the photograph has been perceived as an objective record of reality, the product of a mechanical and therefore neutral means of documentation. . . . Photographs derive the authority of their content from realism and accuracy, what J. B. Harley calls 'talismans' of authority; archival photographs convey their message through function and context. . . . The photograph is neither truth nor reality, but a representation willed into existence for a purpose and mediated by the persons concurring in its formation.