Problem:
Our visual-sharing age gives us the perception we are now connected to reality in videos and images shared publicly on social media platforms. However, as we become savvier, we learn that we can be lied to by our eyes because of the power that context plays in images.
As art critic Geoffrey Batchen says:
"[T]raditional photographs - the ones our culture has always put so much trust in - have never been "true" in the first place. Photographers intervene in every photograph they make, whether by orchestrating or directly interfering in the scene being imaged; by selecting, cropping, excluding, and in other ways making pictorial choices as they take the photograph; by enhancing, suppressing, and cropping the finished print in the darkroom; and, finally, by adding captions and other contextual elements to their image to anchor some potential meanings and discourage others." (1994)
What are critical questions to ask about an image to understand its true meaning as distinct from its intended message?