Photographs as Evidence ∗

Photographs furnish evidence. This is true in both formal and informal contexts. The use of photographs as legal evidence goes back to the very earliest days of photography, and they have been used in American trials since around the time of the Civil War. Photographs may also serve as historical evidence (for example, about the Civil War). And they serve in informal contexts as evidence about all sorts of things, such as what we and our loved ones looked like in the past. Photographs are not, of course, the only sorts of pictures that can furnish evidence. It is not hard to think of cases in which a non-photographic picture might serve as legal evidence (perhaps of art theft?). Cave paintings serve as anthropological evidence of human habitation. And crude pictures chalked on the side of a building may serve informally as evidence of adolescent mischief. Nonetheless, photographs seem to have a distinctive epistemic status as compared with other sorts of pictures. Unlike the aforementioned examples of non-photographic depictions, photographs typically provide evidence specially about what they depict. Most significantly, the epistemically special character of photographs is revealed by this fact: we are inclined to trust them in a way that we are not inclined to trust even the most accurate of drawings and paintings. The traditional explanation for the special epistemic status of photography is that photography is an inherently realistic medium. This certainly sounds