By Rachael Harper

IS photography really an accurate representation of life or is it just blinding us from reality?

With the digital era we live in, this question seems more important than ever. Can we really believe our eyes?

Nowadays, there is this increased use of Photoshop and airbrushing techniques to make photographs and subjects seem something they’re not. Whether it’s the perfect skin and physique of the models we see on the front of glossy magazines, or David Cameron on holiday, any image can be adjusted to be aesthetically pleasing for the audience and to tell a different story entirely. The recent controversy over the naked images of Kim Kardashian, which were blatantly edited, are a perfect example of this fake, manipulated world we are in.

It gives an inaccurate representation of women and further provokes this question of photography as being a bunch of idealistic lies.

A quote taken from a recent documentary called “Reely and Truly” provides an insightful, deeper perspective on photography itself, reading: “The reassuringly objective could become the treacherously subjective in photographs.

“This is the pleasure as well as the menace of photography, whose archives are as full of fiction as of truth.”

The fascinating archive by fashion/portrait photographer and filmmaker, Tyrone Lebon, further explores this fine line between fact and fiction, gaining opinions through interviews with artists like Mario Sorrenti.

At the end of the day, all a camera can do is record light bouncing off of something. Maybe there is often need to retouch an image slightly, for emphasis and enhancement, but when this change shifts so far that is distorts the original image from reality, that’s when it becomes a problem.