Errol Morris Quotes

Photography has always been capable of manipulation.

In a Photoshopped world, only the skeptical eye prevails.

Fashion pictures show people looking glamorous. Travel pictures show a place looking at its best, nothing to do with the reality. In the cookery pages, the food always looks amazing, right? Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda.

To say that "the camera cannot lie" is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practised in its name.

Every photograph is a fake from start to finish.

Seeing is no longer believing. The very notion of truth has been put into crisis. In a world bloated with images, we are finally learning that photographs do indeed lie.

As a photographer, I'm interested in how dramatically photography has changed. Most images are not real or are composites, and most of us don't even know it anymore.

Magazines airbrush everything. If you think it's an illusion, then it probably is.

What if I said that every photograph I made was set up? From the photograph, you can't prove otherwise. You don't know anything from the photograph about how it was made, really.

We can now manipulate images to such an extrodinary extent that there's no lie you cannot tell.

There was a company that I did a photo shoot for once that manipulated the photo so much, I was like, "That's not even me." Like, what's the point? You wanted my name, and then you wanted the version of me that I'm not. I absolutely hate it.

Every photograph could be set up. If one could imagine it, one could set it up. The whole discussion is a way of not talking about photographs.

Photography seduces us into thinking we can believe photographs, whereas we can't really believe that a picture can tell us any kind of truth at all.

I think the media spends a lot of time fooling itself.

While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.

You can Photoshop something, put it out, and everyone believes it.

They say the camera never lies. It lies every day.

In the adverts, I look like I do because 150 people have spent seven hours making me look dazzling. That's not me at all.

Photoshop makes things look beautiful just as you have special effects in movies. It's just a part of life.

With the indiscriminate touching-up of photos, we've grown accustomed to seeing personalities drained of all their humanity, yet we consider them as real.

I have a dark room, and I still process film, but digital photography can be a totally lying kind of experience; you can move anything you want... the whole thing can't be trusted, really.

Don't ever believe what you see in films.

I think of scientific veracity as an idea from the past - the scientists say it is so, the photo is proof. Even the authoritative power of the word actual - an actual what? An actual retouched photo, an actual collaged photo?

It's in our biology to trust what we see with our eyes. This makes living in a carefully edited, overproduced and photoshopped world very dangerous.

With chemical film, it was possible to alter photographs, but you had to be an expert. That's not true any more. The LA Times fired a photographer at the beginning of the Iraq War for editing two shots together. Photography is crumbling. Certainly it is for the newspapers a bit now, isn't it? There will be painting again, absolutely!