As you may know, I prefer unposed snapshots, although I recognize they’re no less deceiving than posed shots in depicting reality. Or as New York Times chief art critic Michael Kimmelman wrote in 1997, “all photographs are contrived to the degree that the photographer chooses the image, framing what is to be in and out of it.”
For instance, this photo of Dana at the window of our hotel room in Rome is sorta quaint—the light and shadow, the Old World shutters and the new world glass window, the architecture of the building across the way and the Vermeer turn of her head—but the actual action depicted is her mild annoyance at me for photographing her as she clipped her fingernails. I think she may have been trying to hit the loud accordionist on the street below.
And now your perception of a photo has been altered to something you were probably better off not knowing.