Marshall McLuhan Quotes

While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.

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

It is clear enough by now to most people that the camera never lies is a foolish saying. Yet it is doubtful whether most people realize how extraordinarily slippery a liar the camera is.

In a Photoshopped world, only the skeptical eye prevails.

I believe it was probably less than ten minutes that went by from the invention of photography to the point where people realized that they could lie with photographs.

People say photographs don't lie, mine do.

Great claims are being made for the photograph as truth. We are showing you things, we show you the war. I say you can't actually. The camera can't.

The camera lies all the time; lies 24 times/second.

Photography has always been capable of manipulation.

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.

I feel sad when I realize how much truth is being changed or obscured in the American media.

I know every politician spins the truth a little.

Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.

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.

When I started out, it was considered very wrong to change an image. There were scandals if someone inserted a sky into a war picture or something. Now it's all about that.

In this crazy political business, at least in our times, a lie unanswered becomes truth within 24 hours.

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've never understood the value of putting someone on television to lie, knowing that they're going to lie ahead of time, knowing that that is their deal: to lie ahead of time. There is zero news value in that.

There's so much in the media that's not the truth.

Trump followed Fox's lead. He parroted what he heard on TV. He lied and lied, but rather than suffer the consequences, his lies were excused and supported and even celebrated by his media enablers.

People often trust low-res images because they look more real. But of course they are not more real, just easier to fake. [...] You never see a 10-megapixel photograph of Big Foot or the Abominable Snowman or the Loch Ness Monster.

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?

This is a photograph, so it is as you see: there are no lies and no deceptions. One can detect here, elevated to an incomparably higher level, the same pathetic emotional appeal that lies concealed in every fake spiritualist photograph, every pornographic photograph; one comes to suspect that the strange, disturbing emotional appeal of the photographic art consists solely in that same repeated refrain: this is a true ghost... this is a photograph, so it is as you see: there are no lies, no deceptions.

I sometimes lie, especially about personal things, because what does it matter? I am a kind of minute commodity. My name is no longer my own. I try to lie as much as I can when I’m interviewed. It’s reverse psychology. I figure if you lie, they’ll print the truth.

I am very suspicious of cameras and dramatic interpretations and the whole Hollywood myth-making process. I don't trust it. I've seen it affect people in bad ways.