The camera cannot lie. [View all]

'The camera cannot lie’
Printed photographs began to be available to the general public around the mid 19th century. When this phrase was coined, which appears to be just a few years later, the view that a photograph was a faithful representation of a scene, in a way that a subjective painting could never be, was a reasonable one.
Of course, ‘the camera cannot lie’ was coined before Photoshop.
Many of the earliest references to the phrase describe people’s inability to believe that they look like their photographic portraits. Nevertheless, it may well be that the phrase was used ironically from the start. Whether or not people believed the notion of photographic veracity then, they certainly don’t now. We know that the ubiquitous photographic images that fill our visual world are constructs rather than absolute truth.
A similar phrase occurs in Dion Boucicault’s play The Octoroon, first performed, in New York, in 1859:
“The apparatus [a camera] can’t mistake. When I travelled round with this machine, the homely folks used to sing out, “Hillo, mister, this ain’t like me!” “Ma’am,” says I, “the apparatus can’t mistake.”

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