Proving a photo is fake is one thing. Proving it isn’t is another

is the first casualty of war is an old aphorism. One recent instance is the proliferation of images and videos of things that did not happen, in wars such as those currently going on in Ukraine and Syria. Some of these are outright fakes. Others are manipulated versions of honestly recorded material. Last year a doctored video appeared of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, apparently telling Ukrainian soldiers to surrender.The proliferation of such fakes has, though, led to a second, more subtle approach to lying with images. This is to use their ubiquity to cast doubt on the veracity of inconvenient pictures that are real.