Just to give an example: This is a photo of Lincoln’s ghost, taken around 150 years ago:
By William Mumler, ca. 1872.
By William Mumler, ca. 1872.
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I’m very optimistic of an opportunity and an ability to find or create such a truth capturing entity which is as unbiased as we as human beings can understand and comprehend, should be created to help with capturing ‘as is’ vs what the documenter ‘thought is right’.
Thank you for your comment, much appreciated. 
You can change the truth, when you change the lens.
In a book I saw good example:
In the foreground a sculpture, in the background a building. 1st image with wide angle, 2nd with a tele, and the sculpture had always the same size in the image. But the building in the first image looks small, in the second image large.
So - what is the truth, small or large building?
With aperture you can emphasize certain parts of the image and deviate from others. We could go on with this.
Truth is a philosophic problem.
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I remember a similar example where the “truth” aspect is probably even more relevant:
During Covid times, we had rules that people had to keep 1.5 m distance from each other in public spaces. I saw a set of two photos, the first showing people standing in a line very close to each other (so obviously ignoring the 1.5m-rule). But the second image showed the exact same scene with a wider angle lens and from a different point of view, showing that there was actually quite some space between the individual people. The first photo just had used tele-compression to make it look like they were standing much closer to each other than they actually were.
So no matter what kind of capturing device and post-processing is used, a photographer can always (and always could) skew reality, simply by choosing the point of view and what to include/exclude in the frame.
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True, the exception being though is that you can create a one-click style for different genres of photography. I have created one that works for around 70% (landscape, pets in daylight) of the photos I take, and then add another 20% with further tinkering of those style settings. The final 10% generally requires a more custom approach. That sytle isn’t suitable.
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I’m afraid this to be much more difficult than one imagines, and happily so!
Regard this: by taking in our hands a camera we dismiss scent, sound, tactile, taste, lots of feelings, temperature, etc etc…
We dismiss mostly all social connections dealing with our subjects.
We dismiss the inner being of nearly all we bring into view only exposing parts of the outside.
When using a camera we point and nearly completely dismiss the rest of the world, we expose and dismiss all the rest as over/underexposed, we choose a distance leaving most of our image in the blurr, we choose enlargement so we omit bacteria, we choose color leaving most wavelength out of consideration.
And finally when I look at your picture I manage to see something different from what you meant to expose… I am so sorry but I can’t avoid this.
And I’m soo happy for this…
Please bear in mind that I have no cynical intentions here whatsoever! I regard the richness - and the poverty - of our world with wonder together with despair.
Excuse my rant.
Kind regards, Jetze
‘It takes every kind of people, to make what’s life’s about’ Robert Palmer
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