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Is augmented reality killing our trust in photography?

The next time you stroll down Washington's National Mall, open your Snapchat app and you might come face to face with a giant sculpture of Popeye – or at least the digital recreation of a Jeff Koones' art piece.

The sculpture is part of a new augmented reality platform Snapchat launched late last year that sees digital art sculptures pinned to real-world locations. It is one of Snapchat's many AR initiatives that lets users add or alter elements to their snaps. There is also Sky Filters – a tool that transforms blue skies into pink sunsets and night scenes, potentially allowing people to change how they portray the world around them. There is Lens Studio, which opens up these AR possibilities to third parties – individuals and companies alike.

In the era of fake news, are these AR tricks, while crude at the moment but constantly improving, helping demolish a collective trust in imagery? "What's Snapchat's SkyFilters show is that it's now possible for camera-based devices to edit reality in real time," says photographer Tomas van Houtryve, who has, in his work, experimented with various technologies, including infrared cameras, to question the impact of technology on our society. "That alone will further erode the trust that people have in the believability of anything recorded on camera."

That trust has faced many challenges over the years as photo manipulation tools have multiplied and moved out of the darkroom and into the digital world – on our computers and on our phones. "More people have become aware of the plasticity of photography," van Houtryve says. "Augmented Reality filters are likely to be the last straw that undermines our intuitive trust in the veracity of photographs." He argues that is bad news for photojournalists who depend on that assumption of veracity in their work.

For these photographers, it is going to become essential that they be transparent about their ethics – ones that repudiate such manipulations, believes Fred Ritchin, a former picture editor at the New York Times and the Dean of the International Center of Photography. "The problem, right now, is we don't know what the rules are. It's a golden opportunity for professionals to set these rules, to explain what standards they abide to."

These standards will not apply to the general public, though, and that is a good thing, says Stephen Mayes, a visual communication strategist, giving way to "new and alien expressions made possible by the computational processes that are integral to digital image-making. We should fasten our seat belts because it's going to be a bumpy ride for several months, maybe even a year or two, as we get our heads around the possibility that the pink midday sun in a Snapchat image was not actually pink."

It will not take long, he believes, as there will be hundreds of millions of image-makers ready to push boundaries "far beyond the timid thresholds laid down by the professionals" and offer new opportunities for expression. "No longer are we limited to showing what something looks like, now we can incorporate our emotional responses and make invisible thoughts visible," he adds.

That is what van Houtryve is afraid of. "Are there groups out there that don't like the way reality is right now and would be tempted to edit it in real time? I can imagine that an Augmented Reality app that detects the American flag and swaps it for the Confederate battle flag in real time would be quite popular in some circles."

A world where imagery becomes attuned to our emotions and biases sound good but, says Ritchin, it is not cause for celebration. "In this world of entitlement where we're supposed to get everything we want, AR is giving us the illusion of choice. For me that's pathetic."

In other news this week: A man claims to have found a photo of famed war photographer Gerda Taro on her death bed, The Guardian reports. Robert Capa's partner was killed during the Spanish Civil War in 1937; the Tate Modern's curator of photography Simon Baker is moving from London to Paris as he takes the leadership of the French capital's largest photography museum, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie; and Apple says the next version of its iPhone operating system will let third parties integrate real world images into AR experiences, making it possible to fill "a museum with interactive exhibits or [bring] a movie poster to life," according to Apple.

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