s y a w Al The Camera Doesn’t Lies For years, people have believed that the camera doesn’t lie—but cameras are more misleading than you might realize, and the truth is hard to photograph.
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n 1824 Joseph Nicéphore Niépce took a picture with his camera. That might not sound like a big deal—except for the fact that, until that day, no one had managed to take a permanent photograph before. Niépce’s camera was the end result of centuries’ worth of research and theories in the scientific community, and his picture marked the birth of the world of photography. By 1839 the first commercially available cameras were on the market—and while it would be another half a century before George Eastman released his affordable Kodak model, it was now officially possible to document life through the lens of a camera. The world would never be the same.
“The apparatus can’t mistake”
Thirty-five years after Niépce took his groundbreaking photograph, a play called The Octoroon debuted in New York. One of the characters has a camera of his own and is used to hearing “the homely folks” complain that
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their portraits don’t look right. He often explains, “The apparatus can’t mistake . . . You may mistake your phiz [face] but the apparatus don’t.” (If they continue to complain that the photograph wasn’t agreeable, he follows up with a reminder that “the truth seldom is.”) The apparatus can’t mistake. Sound familiar? Over time, the phrase has morphed a little, but the sentiment hasn’t. You’ve probably heard (or even used) the modern-day equivalent: “The camera doesn’t lie.” Strange thought, that. Niépce used a cumbersome box that had to be pointed at a subject for multiple days while the sun burned that image into the bitumen coating of a lithographic stone. Today, there are phones with lenses and sensors smaller than your fingertip designed to record not just a single frame, but entire videos—60 frames captured every second, each one recorded in 4K resolution and accompanied with perfectly crisp audio.
January/February 2021
