To maintain focus on this response when examining photography’s ability to reveal and conceal I and going to examine it under the pretense of concealing and revealing as relative deviation from an experience that would be firsthand.

There are philosophical questions to consider regarding this topic. Firstly, is the experience offered by photography a degradation of the real experience or something separate, with intrinsic value as a unique medium, despite its limitations? It serves as a form of documentation, capturing moments in time that undeniably occurred and often offering more accuracy than our own memories. Photography is an art form that mirrors the truth, conceals it, and reveals it to the world, granting immense power.

Secondly, what is truth? Is it your truth, my truth, the objective truth, or the truth an artist wishes to express and frame in a photograph, distorting the image into something new and unveiling what was hidden in plain sight?

There is a duality when examining photography’s power as a medium that can simultaneously unveil and obscure the truths of the world. Overall, it has democratized knowledge, but its mass accessibility has profoundly influenced contemporary culture attitudes engendered a false sense of certainty and serves to conceal.

Our world is analogous to Plato’s cave, an allegory Sontag used to discuss the deceptive appearances of things we encounter in reality. Photography, as Sontag argues, offers us “mere images of the truth” (1), constituting the initial layer of concealment in our experience like mere shadows observed in a cave. Photographs freeze moments in time and space, transforming our relationship with the true experience into a secondhand one through the medium of photography—a deviation from the truth. This secondary experience also desensitizes us to the actual experiences captured, as it cannot fully communicate the depth of those moments, thereby it can numbs and conceals the horrors and tragedies in our history.

Secondly, in a world flooded with easily accessible photographs capturing nearly everything, a dilemma emerges: the human experience is not as limitless as the photographs we collectively accumulate. Consequently, we must become selective with our attention, reshaping our notions of significance and altering the way we engage with the world. This unique relationship leads us to choose, for instance, what is worth photographing at the expense of mundane aspects of life that we cast aside, or rare sights that have become overly accessible, losing their sense of urgency.

Thirdly, the manipulability of photographs can work to conceal the truth. “Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out.” (2) Photos are mere snapshots without context of complex situations which can be highly misleading. It reminds me of an optical illusion where one person’s foot is positioned in a way that, when viewed from a certain angle, creates the illusion of the knife depicting a situation where the truth was the reverse of what is depicted.