In our spring season finale, Danny Goodwin, professor and chair of UAlbany's Department of Art & Art History, discusses our foolhardy pursuit of truth from images "that can only lie" — and why it's wrong to blame photography for the ways humans deceive themselves with technology. Artificial intelligence didn’t cause this crisis of confidence, but to him the prescription is clear: slow down and think.
In this episode, Danny recounts his experience as an expert witness in a murder trial evaluating two competing sets of crime scene photographs of blood stains. What the photos showed (or didn’t) was a potentially significant detail in the case.
More important for this conversation is the context: The photographs were originally shot on 35mm film and therefore theoretically beyond the reach of the digital and AI manipulation we fret so much about today.
But as Danny explained to the court and us, the notion that analog photos depict reality any more than digital ones has always been fantasy. What we think we see in photos, then and now, is as much about us, what we are told about them, and the innumerable unknown choices — like how to balance the colors in the image — made by those who produced them.
There seem to be parallels there to the so-called "CSI Effect," in which jurors' casual knowledge of forensic science fueled by popular culture has been blamed for creating unrealistic evidentiary standards in their minds while deciding actual cases. (This may or may not be true.)
Danny had more to say about his courtroom experience, and the way photographic evidence is used and interpreted in courtrooms more generally. The rest of the story, edited and condensed below for brevity, is worth a read.
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DG: When developing a photo, there's such a thing as a standard color balance. However, there are a lot of things that affect the color temperature — the light under which it was photographed and if there was a window open at the time. There are a lot of things that affect decisions about exposure and shadows and highlights. I looked at the two sets of prints in this case, and I would not have balanced either set of prints the way they were balanced.
The prosecution’s were way red. The defense’s were way cyan. The true, or at least the aesthetically correct, balance was somewhere in between. We also have to keep in mind that a photograph of something is not the thing itself. That's to say that you can't point to things in that frame and say what they are. It's a photograph of something. It's something that looks like a garage floor, and it's something that looks like some kind of stain.
To make the leap to say not only what it is — what that substance is — but how old it is and how it got there, that's something we should laugh at. But this is the police and a forensic photographer. And they're official — they're experts. The jury hears this and believes they know how they use photographs. They hold it up like a window to reality and look and say, “I got it. See, this happened.”
At one point, the judge got frustrated with me. I had the viewing filters that a person uses to make color decisions about which way photographs should be developed. And if you stare through it — you hold a magenta filter up to your eye and you stare through it — eventually it looks fine. Your brain is adjusting in real time. Printers know you have to flash it in front of your eye — on, off, on, off, on, off — and then look at a card that tells you what to do. Dial in 10 points of magenta, or take it out. I showed the judge: here, look —motor oil, blood, motor oil, blood. And he's like, “You got one of those that makes it look like the Easter Bunny?”
I said, “Well, no, I'm not saying that anything's possible. I'm saying that the argument that this represents unmediated truth is insane. It's a depiction. It's an abstraction. It's a two-dimensional photographic record of the way something looked at a time with all these other executive decisions that came into play.”
Check out Danny's personal website to learn more about his art, specifically Job/Security, a collaboration with UAlbany English Professor Edward Schwarzschild that examines the expanding U.S. homeland security sector through interviews and photographs.
He and Schwarzschild were interviewed about that project seven years ago on another UAlbany podcast.
Back to the topic at hand: Photography’s crisis of confidence is not new, and for evidence of that Danny pointed to the discovery that one of the most iconic photos in U.S. history —the flag raising on Iwo Jima —doesn’t show exactly what people thought it did for 70 years.
Another striking wartime photo —Robert Capa’s “Falling Soldier” from the Spanish Civil War —has also inspired skepticism about its reported location and context.
For a more contemporary example, Danny pointed to the way photography, videography and AI shaped the public’s understanding of what happened during this year’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, in which two people were shot and killed by federal law enforcement.
If you haven’t yet, you should also check out last week’s episode of The Short Version on 19th-century spirit photography with Associate Professor of English Erica Fretwell, which perfectly set the stage this conversation.
Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman
Photos by Patrick Dodson
Interview by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist
Hosted and written by Erin Frick
[0:01] Erin Frick: Welcome to the spring semester finale of The Short Version, the UAlbany podcast that tackles big ideas, big questions, and big news in less time than it takes to cross the Academic Podium. I'm Erin Frick in UAlbany's Office of Communications and Marketing.
[0:16] Danny Goodwin: I think a lot of folks will look through the frame of a photograph and see reality on the other side. We all do it. Like, I'll hold up my phone and say, "Here's my dog.” And that's a crazy thing to say because I'm pointing at a brick in my hand that's glowing.
[0:34] Erin Frick: In February 2015, a simple dress broke the internet. Not because of who wore it first, or what it was made of. The furor stemmed from debate over its color. Was it black and blue or white and gold? The people of the internet saw both and frenzy ensued. The trick, as it turned out, was a matter of perception relative to light. Whether you perceived the dress to be fully lit or in shadow shaped whether you saw it as one pair of colors or the other.
There is also a bit of neuroscience to this, but we’ll have to save that for next season.
The point is: While we often look to photography to reflect reality, the viral dress reminds us that simple dynamics of perception can drastically distort what we believe we see.
Last week on The Short Version, UAlbany English Professor Erica Fretwell discussed the phenomenon of spirit photography, the 19th century practice of double exposing portraits to produce the illusion of a deceased loved one sharing the frame with their living kin. Erica likened the practice to modern videos that use AI to reanimate the dead. Whether the image is real or not, she argues, matters less than how it makes us feel.
This week, we continue to explore how technology shapes our view of photography. In conversation with my colleague Jordan Carleo-Evangelist, UAlbany Art Professor Danny Goodwin discusses what he terms “the paradox of photographic veracity” and how the integration of AI and photography is leading us, more and more, to question what we see.
Since the advent of photography, editing and manipulation have always been in the picture. But now, like with many things, AI is changing the game. Anyone with internet access can quickly generate a convincing image of, well, anything. Sometimes it’s easy to spot the sixth finger, but often, the result appears so plainly real that it doesn’t occur to us to question.
In this week’s episode, Danny and Jordan challenge our reliance on photographs as truth — and the idea that AI is raising new cause for concern.
Like any artform, intention is intrinsic to the medium. A photographer’s choice of angle, what’s in the frame versus an inch to the right, what’s lit or in shadow, how close is the subject? These elements — and so many more — are deliberate and designed. Do these choices make the resulting image any less real? No. But we should remember to think about them.
As we navigate the daily barrage of images fed to us on screens, Danny suggests the best thing we can do is slow down. Whether the linger is for pleasure, or to cast a critical eye, being more thoughtful about what we take in could help us better appreciate the artform, stop blaming it for choices we make, and exercise greater vigilance over what to believe.
Here’s Danny and Jordan.
[3:09] Jordan Carleo-Evangelist: What do you do at UAlbany and how did you end up here? What was your path to Albany like?
[3:15] Danny Goodwin: Yeah, well, I'm a photographer, artist, who works primarily in photography, and I came to UAlbany in 1999. I was kind of brought on board to update the photography curriculum here. You know, it was the nineties, so digital was like a noun, which drives us crazy. But yeah, it was like, you know, got to bring the digital, so I did that for the most part. That's part of why I reached out to you in terms of the conversation about photography more broadly is that what we're going through with AI right now is kind of a refrain with which I'm kind of familiar.
[3:52] Jordan Carleo-Evangelist: So at what point in your life did you know that art, photography specifically, was for you?
[3:59] Danny Goodwin: I'm from Dallas, and no one in my family was an artist in any direction, and that was not a reasonable thing to say out loud that you do. What do you do? I'm an artist. Oh, what do you like to paint? But what's your job? I was one of those people who went to college to figure out why I was going to college, and I just went to the place that the guy in my band was going. What's the minimum? SAT? Okay, I can go there. Good. And I thought I was going to be a business major.
[4:28] Jordan Carleo-Evangelist: I was going to say, is there a parallel timeline where you're an accountant right now?
[4:32] Danny Goodwin: A really [bleep] accountant? Yeah. I bombed out of a few things and cut a deal with my dad, like, if I can do this other thing, and do well, how about that? And I did. I took some photography classes and got turned onto art and saw a life that looked really cool. A tenured faculty member, my mentor at the time, Skeet McAuley. His life just looked really great. I mean, he made his work and he didn't have to apologize for moonlighting. It was required. He had to make it or he was fired, and he taught classes and hung out with students and had pretty high-level conversations and I was like, that's what I want to do.
[5:15] Jordan Carleo-Evangelist: When you reached out, you used the term, “the paradox of photographic veracity.”
[5:21] Danny Goodwin: Yeah.
[5:22] Jordan Carleo-Evangelist: What exactly do you mean by that?
[5:23] Danny Goodwin: I mean, I've kind of been telling myself the same joke for a long time and I still giggle at it. What I mean is we're doing it wrong with photography. We collectively, culturally, and I think a lot of photographers are aware that we're doing it wrong, and by that I mean we're looking at photographs a little too quickly. There's a strategy, visual thinking strategies (VTS), that museum professionals and educators employ, and it's complicated, but basically it's three questions: What do you see? What makes you say that? And what else? What we believe, we artists, is that everyone does that. Everyone looks at a thing and describes it to themselves in their minds, what they see, and everyone tells themselves what it means and then everyone tells themself if it's good or bad. But you do it really fast, like too fast, so fast that you gloss over biases and presumptions. What I mean by the paradox is that, yeah, lenses gather light off of things in the world reflected off of real stuff. Photographs can be records. They do trace a thing that happened in a 60th of a second, but you can't just stop there. And I think a lot of folks will look through the frame of a photograph and see reality on the other side.
[6:50] Jordan Carleo-Evangelist: There was another thing you said to me that struck me because you said what we see in each photograph is to varying degrees informed by what we expect to see. Countering this tendency takes a kind of slow and close looking more akin to reading or scientific inquiry.
[7:06] Danny Goodwin: Yeah.
[7:07] Jordan Carleo-Evangelist: I agree, but –
[7:09] Danny Goodwin: But…
[7:10] Jordan Carleo-Evangelist: That is not how the global population consumes media and certainly not on social media.
[7:17] Danny Goodwin: For sure.
[7:18] Jordan Carleo-Evangelist: Our attention spans are fragmented and shrinking. And those three points you just said were: What do you see? What makes you say that? And what else?
[7:26] Danny Goodwin: Yeah.
[7:28] Jordan Carleo-Evangelist: I'm not asking those second two questions.
[7:30] Danny Goodwin: There’s no time to, man.
[7:31] Jordan Carleo-Evangelist: And I don't think anybody is, no, but what do we do?
[7:34] Danny Goodwin: No, you would give yourself an aneurysm if you did that with every single photograph you encountered, especially if you're scrolling. I just know that as I say at the outset, we're doing it wrong. I was contacted to testify in this very high-profile murder trial, and this was like the third appeal. The police essentially didn't have physical evidence, so they decided that their most solid piece of evidence was photographs, and in particular, it was because they were shot on film, 35 millimeter negatives, no digital, nothing, and they asserted therefore that the things depicted in these were truth. This is evidence — which is insane. Most photographers know from making photographs that they are constructions. You decide where to stand, you decide how to light it, you decide when to press the shutter. Then you have to print it. Even if it's not digital, you got to make a lot of executive decisions about what's in that frame. If with 20 points more magenta, the motor oil stain on the garage floor looks like blood and you've been told it's blood, then yeah, it's blood. But if you've been told it's motor oil, you balance it for motor oil.
[8:50] Jordan Carleo-Evangelist: So much of the conversation and sort of the collective anxiety about the impact that AI has had on the ability to manipulate images, manipulate video extremely convincingly, if not explicitly, sort of, implicitly suggests this is a new, worse development. You're saying photographs have never really been, sort of, this ground truth that many people assume that they are.
[9:18] Danny Goodwin: Yeah, that's why I call it a defense of photography because it's, I think, categorically unfair to assign that burden to the medium. It's a technology that has always been evolving since the moment it was simultaneously invented in two places, and it continues to evolve, and some practitioners hyperventilate when certain new developments come about. I studied briefly with Roy DeCarava at Hunter College who was still pissed that color photography existed. It was like, it's a corruption, it's too much flavor, man. And then digital photography hit the scene, and everyone was like, that's not photography, that's painting, that's something else. But if you look back far enough, all film was orthochromatic. It was a very narrow bandwidth that it was sensitive to. So if you were a landscape photographer, first of all, there were no hobbyists. It was all scientists – because you had to travel with a dark room. You had to make a separate exposure for the sky and the landscape, and it was just known because of the technical limitations of the medium. And then you go into the dark room and strip 'em together.
That wasn't considered sleight of hand or manipulation, it's just how you make the picture. And then it was “making” a photograph, at the outset. Then it became “taking”. There's reality over there, you hold up this pipe to it, and you suck in. But you “take” that picture. All of that goes to say that that's us. We did that to photography. It's not photography. It's not the process. We adapted it to suit this presumption that we had because we needed to have it be simple. And I think we still need it to be simple. So, long way around the block, but I think the challenge of AI is that it's just super slick. It's not necessarily lens-based anymore. It's internet based. It's new in the way that it works, but it's not new to create a sort of pastiche of preexisting imagery to make a new image or video.
[11:26] Jordan Carleo-Evangelist: So much of what we're shown and how what we're shown is selected by AI itself is geared to make us feel things, usually not good things, and it's just like we consume things so fast, and so uncritically, and there's so much of it, and it's optimized for big emotions, that it just seems like the entire system is stacked against the sort of thoughtful, scientific interrogation of images that you're talking about.
[11:52] Danny Goodwin: Yeah. There's this sort of cliche that a photograph can't lie. It's like no, photographs can only lie. Just semantically, when you point at a thing and you describe the contents of that two-dimensional abstraction, the way they arranged themselves to resemble something in the world, that's fiction, that's not true. Photographers can lie, and viewers of images can lie to themselves, and do, constantly. But they can also not lie.
[12:21] Jordan Carleo-Evangelist: One of the things that seems different to me about AI and related tools, and maybe it's not, is that as technology advances, the barrier to entry to doing more advanced manipulation gets lower and the proliferation of visual garbage accelerates.
[12:42] Danny Goodwin: Yeah.
[12:43] Jordan Carleo-Evangelist: What do we do about that?
[12:44] Danny Goodwin: So, I don't know, and that's what I, kind of, wrestle with. I do know that we remain stubborn about the way we think about photographs, and so the jig is up. Everyone knows that that frame is mutable. It's not a pipeline to truth and reality. We know that, but we can't change the habit of looking through it. So, what should have happened — it should have happened with the advent of digital photography and Photoshop and all of that — is that we would be much more critical and really look at that image, not through it, and recognize that we are a participant in putting together that meaning. And it's significantly accelerated with AI.
[13:29] Jordan Carleo-Evangelist: So the way I see this sort of manifesting in my own life and media consumption is not to be more critical and more thoughtful. It's to disengage entirely.
[13:39] Danny Goodwin: Yeah.
[13:40] Jordan Carleo-Evangelist: And that's fine for something that is sort of low stakes, but there are times when images and videos are extremely important to our understanding of our world, our government, our democracy. But if people's reaction is — I can't really trust anything — and so they don't look at it, isn't that bad?
[14:00] Danny Goodwin: I mean, it's tragic on one hand, but also, it's like, what else did we expect? It's deeply troubling. But I go back to a sort of misguided hand wringing, which is that, oh, we used to be able to trust photographs and now we can't. No, that was not true before. It's just in your face now. Everyone has that responsibility. It used to just be people who would pick it up and acknowledge that I have to slow down a little bit, and really think about this, and who made it. When did they make it? Why did they make it? What are they saying about it now? All that stuff. What do I see? What do I not see? Now, it's just all of us. One of the exercises we do in a photography class called “slow and close looking” is you go into a space and I have gone into the museum or the gallery in advance and covered up the title, the medium, the date, the artist — all of that is covered up — and breaking down that three-step process of describing, interpreting, evaluating. Students come in and I tell 'em, pick an image in this room and look at it for five minutes and describe it. Write down what you see. Then I uncover a bit of information like, silver gelatin print 2019. Alright, now interpret. Look at everything you said that is, and now, armed with this new information, what does it mean? And then, okay, is it good? Is it art? Is it interesting? Because most of us think we go there first. You look at something and it's thumbs up, thumbs down. We think we know what we see, therefore we know if we like it. With students, I argue, what does that have to do with anything? How does that like, dislike —what does that matter? Back up. What does it mean now? Is it any good? Is it effective? And why not, or why?
[15:49] Jordan Carleo-Evangelist: Do you think it's a useful exercise for your average person when they see a photo in the news, or in a gallery, or an exhibition, to just sort of take a beat and recognize that for every photo you see there's ten or 50 they chose not to use for some reason.
[16:08] Danny Goodwin: Oh, sure.
[16:09] Jordan Carleo-Evangelist: And the decisions that go into why they chose this one and not the other 50 do matter, and you don't know what they are, but you know this is the one that for some reason they wanted you to see.
[16:19] Danny Goodwin: I wish everyone would do that. What's in the frame? What's outside the frame? What other frames are there? A practitioner knows this is a salient image out of a huge fund of images. Especially now that they're digital, the bar is pretty low for just taking tons of pictures. And yeah, so, what governed the decision to select that one? Was it something that the photographer was hoping to advance because they were there in the moment? During the Civil War, we know now that they were moving bodies around and posing them, and so there's a pearl-clutching moment of, oh no, that undermines the legitimacy of all of these photographs. I would argue, no, actually, they were there, and their self-assigned job was to document the reality of the brutality of this war. And to do that, they couldn't make photographs with wet plate collodion cameras while the bullets are flying. That just wasn't a thing. So yeah, they witnessed a thing and then kind of did some staging — and that's me projecting a lot of what I want to believe was happening. They might've just been lying.
[17:32] Jordan Carleo-Evangelist: So, folks, take one thing from this conversation.
[17:35] Danny Goodwin: The thing I would say is just slow down. Slow down, when you look.
[17:41] Erin Frick: That was UAlbany’s Danny Goodwin, Professor of Studio Art, Photography and Related Media and Chair of the Department of Art & Art History, in conversation with Jordan Carleo-Evangelist.
In this week’s episode, Danny and Jordan discussed how, as image manipulation becomes easier and more sophisticated, the way we interact with photography is also changing. But this shouldn’t diminish the value of the medium. It’s really up to us. By taking care to slow down and look closely, we can preserve the power of photography to tell stories, document the world as we experience it, and reveal new ways to see and understand.
To learn more about Danny’s experience in the courtroom as an expert witness and see examples of iconic photos that may not show what we thought they did, check out The Long(er) Version, in our show notes.
The Short Version would not be possible without contributions from many people, including, for this episode, Scott Freedman, who provided audio production and editing from the UAlbany Digital Media studio deep inside the Podium tunnels.
This episode wraps the 2026 spring semester, but our bite-sized convos won’t stop here.
Use the summer to catch up, and follow The Short Version on Simplecast, or subscribe via Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts or Amazon Music to make sure you don’t miss an episode when we return in the fall.
Thanks for listening and join us next time for another short conversation about something interesting.
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