By Todd Hayen - August 23, 2025

An interesting course of events is about to take place. We are all about to enter a time machine and return to the era before photography was invented. This would be approximately 1820. Let’s just leave it at that date because, for all intents and purposes, photography as we know it was probably “invented” sometime around 1822 by Frenchman Nicéphore Niépce.

We could argue this fact until we were all blue in the face, considering all of the weird evidence supporting strange photographic-like processes going back to at least the century before. Certainly, photography as we know it today started in the mid-19th century, and more toward the end of it if you really want to get technical. Certainly, no one in the general public knew what a photograph was until the late 1800s.

Humans were around living a rather civilized life for many hundreds of years, if not thousands, before this startling advancement in scientific technology. My, oh my, how did we survive? Rather well, actually. And soon, if not already, we will have to survive again without photography being a reliable presentation of objective reality—assuming it ever was.

So, let’s sit on that for a minute. How reliable has photography been in representing true, objective fact? Well, for one thing, photos have often been subjected to a bit of interpretation. We have never been able to really tell, without question, if a photograph represented reality. It has been easy to snap a photo of something that just isn’t as clear as it seemed to be at the time of snapping.

Then there is obvious “photo retouching”—when a photo is manipulated either in the darkroom (yes, they used to have to actually DEVELOP photos with chemicals!) or even while a subject is being photographed. One of the most interesting cases regarding “in the camera trickery” was the Cottingley Fairy incident, which took place in 1917. It is a fascinating story, including the quite famous writer Arthur Conan Doyle (of Sherlock Holmes fame). Doyle and many others believed, without a doubt, that . . .

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