Wit & Attitude Quote by Harold Evans

Evans is puncturing a comforting superstition: that images arrive pre-certified as truth. His line works because it concedes the kernel of faith we still carry about photography - the camera does record what was in front of it - then flips the moral burden onto the humans who frame, select, caption, and circulate. The bite is in “accessory,” a legal term that drags photography out of the neutral realm of “documentation” and into complicity. The camera isn’t the liar; it’s the getaway car.

The subtext is newsroom-native: Evans spent decades watching how a single photograph can harden into “what happened” faster than any reported paragraph. Cropping turns crowds into mobs or emptiness into solitude. Timing turns defense into aggression. Angle turns a politician into a statesman or a goblin. Add a caption and the image becomes a verdict. None of this requires darkroom trickery; it’s the ordinary toolkit of persuasion, available to every editor and, now, every user with a phone.

Context matters: Evans came up in an era when photojournalism was gaining authority as a democratic witness - and when propaganda, tabloid sensationalism, and state messaging were equally adept at weaponizing that authority. Read today, the line feels almost pre-social-media, which is why it lands harder: it anticipates our algorithmic age where the most “credible” content is often the most frictionless to share. Evans isn’t warning that pictures are fake. He’s warning that pictures are powerful enough to be true and still be used dishonestly, which is the more dangerous problem.