Zsolt Bátori: Interpreting and trusting photographs

Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Roma (MACRO), Rome, Italy, December 7, 2019.

 

ABSTRACT. Interpreting photographs has always been strongly connected to how reliable we consider them in terms of their photographic content. However, in the era of digital photography and the easy manipulation of photographs with photo editing software we often hear the claim that we cannot trust photographs anymore. In this talk I discuss the processes of how we interpret photographs. I argue that our standard interpretation of photographs is more deeply rooted in trusting them than what we usually assume on the basis of their easy manipulability. I rely on my theory of photographic illocutionary acts to account for the specific processes involved in interpreting photographic images.

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