October 4, 2025–January 4, 2026

Today we are flooded with fake images that we mistake as real, and just as many real images that seem utterly unbelievable. Truth and fiction are becoming almost indistinguishable—but were they ever?

Borrowing its title from a recent article in The New Yorker by culture writer Jia Tolentino, this single-gallery exhibition explores how, in some ways, this phenomenon has always been part of photography, even while it is amplified in the age of AI and the internet.

Looking back at our relationship to photography—which is now almost two centuries old—we might ask what has prepared us for this moment. From the beginning, photography’s truthfulness was its most compelling selling point. This also made it easy to manipulate, creating an insatiable public appetite for fake, manipulated, and fantastical photographs. This did not degrade the value of photography, but rather created a human tolerance for the inevitable slippage between truth and fiction. Image manipulation was commonplace in the nineteenth century, from spirit photography to baby portraits. In the twentieth century, photojournalists and documentary photographers carefully composed and cropped photographs of real events. Today artists help us make sense of things by exploring how artifice can magnify complicated realities rather than obscuring them.

This exhibition was curated by Jessica D. Brier, Curator of Photography, and is generously supported by the Hoene Hoy Photography Fund.