Photography as a process goes back many hundreds of years but it was not until a Frenchman, Louis Daguerre continuing the work of his late business partner, Nicephore Niepce combined the use of mercury vapour and fixing salts to produce a process that we today still recognize as the first photographs. His discoveries, announced in 1839 are still part of the process used today in Polaroid photography today.

The process was refined by many of the next few decades until George Eastman made a breakthrough with his patent for a photo emulsion film in 1884 rapidly followed in 1888 with the first patented camera. The same year, the Kodak Company was founded. Its first camera cost $15, a lot of money in 1888. By 1900 Eastman introduced the Brownie at a cost of just $1 and the world of mass photography was born.

Since that day, it has not been the process as much as what the camera captured that has held us captivated across the years. The statement that “The Camera Never Lies” is probably destined to the history books with the invention of the digital era, although there are many examples of the use of trick photography to fool the eye ever since the camera was first put into the public domain.

As early as 1917 and the case of the Cottingley fairies, the photograph has been used to twist the perception of its audience. In the Cottingley hoax, two girls, Fraces Griffiths and Elsie Wright purported to have taken photgraphs with fairies that lived at the stream at the bottom of the garden where Elsie and her parents lived. The photographs created a furore when published alongside an article by Arthur Conan Doyle, who, completely taken in by the fabrication, used it a proof that spirits existed and could be photographed.

It took over sixty years before the two girls, now elderly ladies finally came clean and told the world that the pictures were fakes. But for those sixty or so years, the world believed, well most of them, that the fairies were real.

Photographs have also been used on many occasion in an attempt to disprove a fact. Most notable amongst these attempts are the photographs of the Apollo Moon landings by conspiracy theorists who believe the landings never took place, and that the whole Apollo program took place on a Hollywood style set in the Nevada desert. The most famous of the images ‘proving’ their theory is that of the American flag which seems to be fluttering in a breeze. A breeze, of course, which would not exist on a moon with no atmosphere.

The most famous pictures taken by a private individual and still the cause of many conspiracy theorists today is the footage filmed on an 8mm home movie camera by Abraham Zapruder. The film, probably the best known 90 seconds of moving picture history, depicts, of course , the final moments of the life of then President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Shot from an elevated position above Dealey Plaza, the film was the primary source of evidence used by the Warren Commissions enquiry into the assasination an it is the footage of the third bullet hitting the president that caused many to speculate about the nature of the ‘lone gunman theory’ and the evidence of several gunman firing from the grassy knoll.

Today, with digital media, the camera nearly always lies. The ability to distort the digital image is available to everyone with a computer and the click of a mouse. The results can be as spectacular in their imagery as they are in their deception. They can bring humour and sorrow, change the fortunes of careers or bring news to the world. But for all the complexities of their electronic wizardry one thing is certain.The emotion, whether real or manufactured, portrayed by the still image, still manages to capture a moment in history that forever defies the passage of time.