Photographs are proof: it happened. But since the invention and proliferation of the camera, since Hollywood, since public relations, since televised news, and Photoshop, Facetune, C.G.I., A.I., and deepfakes, we’ve grown more suspicious about images. Maybe we’re less naïve, but seeing the world through gimlet eyes doesn’t make us clear-sighted.
All this has obscured, for more than a century, our sense of a real Hollywood, land of images. Even today, many armchair historians get a righteous surge looking back on the studio system—for any movie lover, one of the greatest moments in American history—eager to wrist-slap these gifted image-makers for constructing (to borrow a fashionable term) “narratives” about themselves, their colleagues, and their culture. We love images, but we’re told not to trust them.
