The Camera Never Lies?

The Camera Never Lies?

The camera never lies in a literal sense - it just records whatever it is pointed at. We can witness converging verticals, for example, but they are geometrically accurate and it's only our brains that want to correct them. We don't want to correct railway lines because we accept converging horizontals as normal, it's just the way our perceptions work.

We can also make the camera seem to lie in other ways - famous images have later proven to be cropped so that the meaning has been changed. These days Photoshop means that almost anything can be made to seem however we wish it to seem. There are simpler ways though, and it's a pity things have gone so far because we start to doubt every image we see. One of our camera club members was outraged by a judge who dismissed her underwater image as "easy to shoot when the fish are in a tank" - she happened to go diving in exotic places and the pictures were real and on location.

There's another way as well to change the meaning of images, and that's via the use of a title or headline. Headlines pull in readers for newspapers and magazines and don't always reflect the content of the article. I've got a couple of images here which are totally factual in content, but they were shot with a tongue-in-cheek intent to give them a misleading and/or provocative title.

Both images were to be called The Future of Motoring and show us a world far in the future when the petrol or diesel car has gone. Very prophetic perhaps as they were shot a long time ago. The first shows the view from a motorway bridge of a long abandoned motorway, now all grassed over.


Actually it is the M602 from the A572 bridge at Eccles while the work was waiting to start on the new motorway. So a new beginning, not the memory of an ending.

The second shows a disused petrol station, grass growing between the flags, all pumps and the shop removed, a defunct establishment.


In reality it is a very active site that was undergoing complete refurbishment and about to launch into new life.

It's all in the title and the context of any accompanying words, because the camera never lies.....