The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), a consortium of many large media and technology companies, is working to develop “technical standards for certifying the source and history (or provenance) of media content.” However, much of the burden is placed on the viewer: “A unique aspect of this approach is rather than attempt to determine the veracity of an asset for a user, it enables users themselves to judge by presenting the most salient and/or comprehensive provenance information.” For viewers looking at large numbers of images online daily, exploring the backstory of how certain images were modified and then reflecting on how each change might have affected the image’s credibility seems like a daunting task. Such a system also requires large-scale
implementation of these standards by media companies and other organizations which so far has not happened, while potentially inviting increased suspicion as to the integrity of imagery made by those who do not sign up for their protocols.
Over the last few months, I have been working with a group of organizations that includes World Press Photo, Magnum Photos, the National Press Photographers Association in the US, and many others, in a campaign called “Writing with Light,” harkening back to the beginnings of photography. The goal is to create a community of practitioners who pledge to make photographs that are “fair and accurate representations of what the photographer witnessed,” and not “to publish a photorealistic synthetic image made by artificial intelligence and pretend that it is a photograph.” The point here is that the reader’s trust must be in the photographer as an author, just as one would trust a writer, rather than automatically believing that simply because something appears to be a photograph it is one.
Without such assurances of credibility, those in power will find it considerably easier to deny any imagery or other media that threatens them, calling it fabricated. And it will be more difficult for citizens to have faith in democracies when information, whether provided by image, text, or sound, is consistently suspect. With all of photography’s shortcomings, including it being used in ways that are both stereotypical and harmful as well as indulging in spectacle, it is unclear whether comparable strategies will emerge that can provide authentic reference points allowing societies to respond to specific challenges, whether war, racism, climate change, famine, or any other.
We are at a fundamental turning point in our sense of the real and the possible. There is an urgency to understand what is at stake, and to develop best practices that preserve and amplify what one wants the media to be able to accomplish. In 1984, when photographers were still using film and digital imaging was in its infancy, I wrote in an article for the New York Times Magazine that “in the not-too-distant future, realistic-looking images will probably have to be labeled, like words, as either fiction or nonfiction, because it may be impossible to tell them apart. We may have to rely on the image maker, and not the image, to tell us into which category certain pictures fall.”
For better or worse, this is where we now find ourselves. The solutions, if there are to be any, must come from everyone, and come soon.
