A photograph feels like hard proof — "the camera doesn't lie." How can a real, unedited image still be bullshit?

Because a genuine photo can still imply a false story through staging, selective framing, and stripped context — and images can be quietly edited too; the picture is "true" while the impression it plants is not.

Photographs carry an aura of objectivity, so viewers import a narrative the image never actually supports. The ways it misleads:

• Staging / decontextualisation. After the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack, an iconic photo showed world leaders arm-in-arm, seemingly leading a vast Paris march. A reverse-angle shot revealed them posed on a cordoned-off, near-empty side street, away from the real crowd — a photo-op, not a march.
• Selective editing / removal. That same leaders' photo was reprinted by an ultra-orthodox newspaper with every woman digitally erased (Angela Merkel and the others simply gone) — the "document" rewritten to fit an agenda.
• Staged "authenticity." Robert Doisneau's famous 1950 Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville, long sold as a spontaneous snapshot of Parisian romance, was in fact posed with hired models — the candid spontaneity was the illusion.

In every case the bullshitter is indifferent to whether the impression is true — exactly Frankfurt's definition, moved from words to pictures.

Tip: Interrogate an image like a claim: what's outside the frame, was it staged, when and where was it really taken, and has it been cropped or retouched?

Go deeper:

• Photograph manipulation — a history of doctored photos, from Stalin airbrushing out fallen comrades onward.