CommentStreams:46c8e0fbc00e943128512871891f2bc0

Your text has some great examples and a good discussion! It also reminds me about discussions of digital photography from the 1990s and later, where it was argued that when leaving chemical photography, we loose the indexicality of photography and that digital photography was/is a different kind of technical construction of the photographic image. However, other people looked into the history of photography arguing that also chemical photography has always been a construction of a certain kind of photographic image character, that was in a way culturally constructed after photography. In this sense, photography was always a contruction and a staging, which you obviously know and demonstrate with the historical examples. One could perhaps ask, if the still more deeply layered staging and eidting points to the ways that photography has always been staged, which is a situation that e.g., Russians will clearly have been acustomed to. To what degree is image laundering a new thing? And how is it new (obviously AI also changes the accessibility and ease)? Simultaneously, digital (smartphone) photography has led to a situation, where everything is photographed from many angles. There are typically images that documents, contradicts, etc. and putting them into series and comparisons with data inscriptions also becomes a way of documenting a (counter-) truth as explored by e.g., Bellingcat and Forensic Archives (see e.g., Fuller, Matthew, and Eyal Weizman. 2021. Investigative aesthetics : conflicts and commons in the politics of truth. London, England ;: Verso Books. ) Anyway, lots of thoughts that you probably can't (and shouldn't) fit in currently, but might lead further. One thing you could perhaps consider, is whether/how the current situation is different from e.g., the 1990s?