Practice question · True or false
Early war photography is reliably candid, because the technology made staging impractical.
Hints
- Long exposures made spontaneous images impossible.
- Staging was a technical necessity, not a deception added later.
Show the answer
False
Why
The opposite: long exposures made staging necessary. Fenton arranged his Crimean cannonballs, and Civil War photographers moved corpses to improve compositions. The camera’s authority is exactly what made faking worth the trouble.
Practise Visual and Iconographic Sources
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