Digital Truth
It is true that The National Geographic moved two of the Egyptian pyramids closer together on a cover, to fit the vertical format. And, yes, the cover photo on A Day in the Life of America was manipulated to move the cowboy closer to the moon, again to fit the format.
Does that mean photographic truth is at an end? Who says it ever existed? Photographs have always been manipulated. Usually the results have not been big whopper lies, pictures that claimed something happened when it didn't, but less serious sins, touch-ups in ads and portraits. The tabloids have always used a bag of photographic tricks. In early examples, as when cameras were barred from courtrooms, scenes were staged and images created through cutting and pasting to show what happened. The tabloids still use photographic trickery to turn the fantastic into the supposedly realistic, showing Actor A with Actress B when they never met, or Elvis alive and well in Country C (or on the moon). With the tabloids "Believe it or not" can mean mainly "not"; seeing is not necessarily believing. When will digital manipulation become a serious problem? We'll see. So far, no digitally manipulated image has provided the occasion for a major crisis in the truth-versus-falsehood department. It may happen tomorrow, or it may never happen as imagined, with someone creating a fake of something important and getting away with it at first, affecting public opinion.
Photography has always been awarded a special status for truthfully recording the world. But that doesn't mean all photographs, all the time. Digital imaging may pose a serious challenge to traditional photographic technology — film, cameras, paper. And it may eventually affect how people view the images they see in newspapers and magazines, or even in family albums. Right now it looks as if the digital effect on photography is more on transmission and handling than on image-creation. There was always darkroom trickery — retouching, double-exposure. It's just that such effects are easier to produce now, and less easy to detect. The problem is that with digital manipulation of photographic images so simple, a slippery slope is created where minor cleaning up of an image can easily lead to major changes. It is not easy to identify a point where truth is lost and the picture enters the realm of fiction. In a world of images showing the most fantastic, imaginary situations in the most realistic, convincing fashion — think of science-fiction films, or the more exotic kinds of still advertising images — the balance may be shifting between traditional straightforward photographs and more spectacular kinds of images made through digital manipulation. It is possible that audience tastes and our sense of an image's credibility are shifting as well: do we still draw sharp lines between news photographs and the other pictures we see in newspapers and magazines?
There is one other potential problem with digital imagemaking. In the civil trial for the murder of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson, O.J. Simpson cried "fake" when a photo turned up showing him wearing Bruno Magli shoes, the kind responsible for bloody footprints at the crime scene. The contact sheet (apparently) was convincing evidence and proved him wrong. That may be hard proof to come by in the future, when photos on digital cameras leave no tracks, as it were, and certainly no negative. In the past the negative was the key physical record of the photographic act and a guarantee of sorts for photographic truth. Our sense of the truth to be found in images may be changing because of digital manipulation. But we still are waiting for our first great test case of digital truth, that is, digital lying.
Presidential Image Making
Acting presidential is one thing, appearing presidential can be another, and in the contemporary United States, it is hard to know which is more important. 
Of course not all presidential pictures are neat, dull images of handshakes after signing bills into law. For that matter, not all American political pictures are of presidents. Politics is played in many ways, and in many places besides Washington, D.C. There are plenty of photographers — and politicians — to go around, and there are plenty of photos of all kinds besides the standards. Some carefully staged media events backfire: Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis looked silly and out of place, not "presidential," riding around in a tank with an ill-fitting helmet on his head. Some political photos are funny — one or two of them intentionally. Most political photos are totally forgettable, some memorable, and a few key images are totally unforgettable, capturing moments of high drama in ways that provide a shared sense of history for all. When that happens, political life somehow escapes control of the spindoctors and image masters, and manages to recover a sense of immediacy, vitality and significance.
Advertising and Persuasion
By the late ninteenth century, advertisers were already convinced that illustrations sold goods, but the shift to photography came after World War I, during the 1920s as the modern advertising industry exploded. Photographs were thought to be more convincing because of their "realism" and "truthfulness."
Advertising photography created an idealized version of middle-class life that was always white, attractive, happy, and capable of reaching the next rung on the ladder to health, beauty, luxury, and success. In the late 1960s some of the race and gender biases of advertising were at last addressed.
For all of photography's supposed realism and its power to make fantasy credible, the underlying strength of photography in advertisements lies in its ability to glorify — and glamorize — the object. A handful of cigarettes can be made to look like the most beautiful, precious and desirable objects in the world. A car can be presented as the symbol of a "lifestyle," the very object needed to prove one's entrance into the world of the rich, stylish and sexy. Of course, photography can work both ways. It can make cigarettes attractive. But it can also help create images that turn people away from cigarettes, by using fashion-model looks as the lure for an ad that warns against smoking.
It is unlikely that people ever swallowed advertising claims whole. Yet even when an advertising photograph is recognized as a performance, it touches real wishes and anxieties and invites belief or wish fulfillment, at least subliminally. For those in search of identity, advertising offers a kind of pictorial windowshopping. The innumerable images show products that promise to create a new sense of self, and they do so with all the brilliance and conviction photography can offer. Seeing through the photographic sales pitch may not be that difficult — but resisting it can be. Social Change
In the late ninteenth and early twentieth centuries Jacob Riis, a Danish-born journalist, used photographs to help support his arguments about the need to reform slum life. The title of his most famous work, How the Other Half Lives, remains a simple description of how social photography generally operates, providing a look at the lower classes to awaken the conscience of the middle and upper classes.
Lewis Hine, known for his photographs of child labor, thought that photography could be "a lever for the social uplift." He believed in the realism of photography as a means of providing unquestionable evidence, although he also used accompanying captions and text to give the photographs even more punch by providing telling information.
The photographers of the Farm Security Administration worked for the federal government during the Great Depression of the 1930s. They were hired to photograph the struggles of the rural poor, and the programs designed by the government to provide help. In the end, they provided a complex portrait that went beyond those boundaries, and their work became a model for many later photographers. As images that attempted to rally support for government programs, the FSA photographs — now stored in the Library of Congress — often played on people's sympathies by showing individuals in trouble, and therefore in need of help, but not in such bad shape that aid would not make a difference. 
Today, photographers continue to use the camera to win support for social causes: poverty and homelessness, AIDS, the farm crisis, the environment. Sometimes they work independently, sometimes they work as photojournalists, sometimes they work for charitable organizations or government agencies. It has never been easy to find support for social reform photography, or to find outlets where it can be published. But many dedicated photographers are still fired by the belief that if they can show hardship and injustice truthfully, fairly and forcefully, people who see their pictures will be moved to respond.
Cultural Identity
Given the treatment of members of these groups in the past (and present), the stakes are always high when it comes to photographic representation. Where stereotypes are at play, any picture can create a positive image or reinforce a negative one. The stakes are increased when the photographer is white, the subject a person of color, and the audience largely white — and more often than not, that has been the case. 
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