The Shape of Truth: What Authenticity Means in Photography

So, What Do We Mean by “Authentic”?

The word has been bounced around a lot lately. Understandably. But under different keyboards, it means entirely different things.

We’re using one word for two very different ideas.

The “Authentic” Feeling

Who talks about authenticity? Marketers.

They are painfully obsessed with connecting with their audience and know that the best, most lasting way is to sell a wish, to create desire or envy. And for that, nothing works better than selling an experience everyone would like to live.

To accomplish that, authenticity is indispensable. People connect to people. And to make that happen, those people need to feel real, spontaneous, imperfect, true to themselves.

Of course, it hasn’t always been this way. Commercial and stock photography has been fooling people for decades by hiring models and recreating scenes that never happened. The young couple laughing as they drink white wine while cooking in their spotless kitchen…. they’re not a couple, they don’t live there, and the wine is just colored water. But it feels authentic, and that’s enough.

Today, marketers often go a step further: taking real, authentic images, often lifted from social media, and hijacking their sincerity to sell an unrelated product or service. That same couple in the kitchen might be genuine, really enjoying their glass of wine in their beautiful home. They’re simply celebrating the departure of their unbearable neighbors.  But marketers will tell you it’s the wine. It’s a contextual displacement, channeling the energy of an image into a fabricated narrative. A deception.

Here, authenticity isn’t about what is real; it’s about what feels real. It’s a measure of effect, not of truth.

The “Authentic” Fact

Then there are the news outlets. Like marketers, photojournalists tell a story.

But photojournalism’s core promise is authenticity through depiction: showing a true event with minimal alteration or editing. It’s about provenance, transparency, and testimony. It’s about capturing what is, with as few changes as possible. Here, authenticity is reinforced by the presence of multiple witnesses, by strong deontological rules, and by carefully respected workflows designed to preserve integrity.

While it began with its own complications, early “news” images were often re-creations; modern photojournalism has built its credibility on a direct relationship with reality. It carries an implicit claim: This happened.

Here, authenticity is not a feeling but a fact. Authenticity as evidence

The Collision

We have a fabrication (the marketing recreation) and a testimony (the news photograph), and we call them both “authentic.”

That’s the problem.

How can you build trust in a word that means both it’s real and it’s a very good fake that feels real? The more we accept the marketer’s definition — authenticity as a style or feeling — the more we weaken the journalist’s definition, authenticity as a fact.

What Should Authenticity Be?

If we want the word to mean anything, we have to choose. The authenticity that builds lasting trust isn’t the one that feels right, but the one that is true.

It should be about:

• Whether the image reveals something true about reality.

• Whether it bears the trace of intentional seeing, rather than automated production.

• Whether it “lets beings be seen as they are,”* rather than imposing a pre-fabricated vision.

Ultimately, authenticity should describe an image that participates in revealing the world, not fabricating it.

When the Camera Is No Longer There

And yet, the question becomes even more complicated when the image no longer needs a camera, a subject, or even a moment to exist.

Generative AI doesn’t record. It invents. There’s no shutter, no lens, no light bouncing off anything. The photograph’s most fundamental promise, that something was, disappears. If photography was once about bearing witness, AI-generated imagery is about conjuring possibilities.

It doesn’t say “this happened” but “this could have.”That’s not automatically wrong. Fiction, after all, has always revealed truths that facts could not.

But when fiction wears the clothes of fact, when an image that never existed looks exactly like one that did, authenticity becomes very hard to locate.

The Paradox of Testimony

Still, not every synthetic image is a lie.

If someone was there, a journalist, a refugee, a survivor, and uses AI to reconstruct what they witnessed but could not photograph, does that make the image false? Or is it another form of testimony?

In those cases, the pixels may be artificial, but the intent is real. If photography was once about bearing witness, AI-generated imagery is about generating witness. The image doesn’t document an event; it translates it. It becomes a visual account rather than a written depiction..It’s no different from a journalist writing an article, except here the tool is an image instead of text.  Authenticity, then, shifts from the physical to the moral, from what the camera saw to what the person lived.

The question is no longer “Did this happen?” but “Is this told truthfully?”. Does this become the new benchmark of authenticity?

The Human Contract

Credibility depends on trust. And trust depends on authenticity. Not the hijacked marketing kind that feels right, but the one that stands by what it shows.

Whether captured or generated, an image earns trust by admitting its origins and intentions.  Not by performing, but by revealing. By showing what it stands for, and standing for what it shows. And that, perhaps, is the only authenticity that will survive the age of invention: Integrity.

In this new ecosystem, authenticity isn’t about purity or perfection. It’s about transparency, not “this happened,” but “this is how this image came to be.” In a world where every image can be fabricated, authenticity can no longer rely on the image itself. It has migrated to the maker. Integrity becomes the new authenticity — not the proof of what happened, but the assurance that what is shown was created with honesty, accountability, and intent.

That distinction matters since it shifts the burden of trust from the viewer’s intuition to the maker’s declaration.

More than a feeling

If authenticity is to remain meaningful, it must be more than a feeling.

It must be an act of intention, transparency, and accountability, the quiet agreement between image, maker, and viewer that what we see, however constructed, still seeks to tell the truth.

Note :

Laura Stanley (Chief Operating Officer, Pexels), Analisa Goodin (Founder & CEO, Catch+Release), Anna Dickson (VP, Content Strategy & Operations, Shutterstock), and I will be speaking on this topic during our panel, “The Trust Advantage: In the Age of GenAI, Using Proven Image Authenticity as Your Competitive Edge,” at the Visual 1st Conference in San Francisco on October 29.

 

Main image is AI -generated.