What is Visual Trust?
The notion of “visual trust” (Canals, 2020) encompasses two interwoven ideas. First, it refers to the act of “trusting images” understood as external visual signs. To trust an image means considering it as a reliable and accountable medium for knowing the world, communicating to others, and intervening in the current course of events. Thus, we can trust (or distrust) photographs, drawings, or images made by AI, to name a few. For instance, we usually trust a GPS when we get lost in an unfamiliar route. We can also trust archive photography as a reliable source for historical knowledge. Images can also be trusted as political devices and be used in contexts like public demonstrations. Sending a digital image to a friend who lives away from us to let her know that we miss her is also a form of visual trust (here, the image is trusted as a device capable of conveying a set of moral values). Despite their differences, all these examples point to the relational, affective and performative dimension of the concept of visual trust.
Second, visual trust points to the credibility given to what our eyes can see, either by their own or with the help of external visual devices. This is what I propose to call a perceptual definition of visual trust. For instance, a doctor may have doubts about the reliability of what she when observing an allegedly cancer cell in a microscope. Mirages are misleading perceptual images. Sometimes we see faces in the street that look strangely familiar to us although we are not sure whether we know that person or not. In these moments, we have doubts regarding the trustworthiness of our optical impressions.
Of course, both senses of visual trust are sometimes phenomenologically indistinguishable, as in photorealistic AI images. We may have doubts regarding what our eyes actually see (“is this a “real photo” or an image generated through AI?”). This sort of optical illusion is an instance of perceptual visual mistrust. Yet we may also have doubts in relational terms. In this case, we may not trust this images as a reliable visual account of the outside world, in the sense that we do not believe that it depicts an external past event. In this case, we mistrust the image understood as a medium for knowing the world.
It is important to note that to trust an image is not the same as to say that an image is true. In general, an image is considered as true either when it maintains a certain link of analogy, indexicality or similarity with that which the image depicts, or when it has been made according to certain established aesthetic and processual patterns. For instance, we commonly accept that a “true” photography is the one that has been made by a photographer with a camera by clicking on the button and letting the light come in, thus leading to a picture that reassembles reality according to a set of formal conventions. In Catholicism, a true image of a saint is the one that follows some aesthetic rules approved by a specific community . Astronomers consider an image of the universe to be “true” if it has been produced according to certain procedures, usually recorded in the metadata. Therefore, to state that an image is "true" we must possess a minimum of information regarding the ontological properties of the image and regarding the connection between the image and “the world” –including the relation between this image and previous images.
In contrast with the notion of “truth”, the principle of “visual trust” usually emerges when there is a lack of knowledge about how the images have been made and about the link that allegedly unites them with what they depict. Also, about what images can really do. In other words: we trust images when we recognize them as problematic epistemological, ethical, and
political devices. On top of this, it is worth recalling that “visual trust” is a mode of engagement with and through images. “Truth”, on the contrary, refers to an ontological property of images themselves. This is why both principles may not coincide: we can perfectly trust images that we recognize as “false” ¬–at least, in a representational sense , as in the case of “anticipatory images” (Argudo-Portal and Canals, 2025). We can also trust images for which the question of being “true” or “false” does not even make sense. Imagine that, on a battlefield, one of the groups raises a white flag to signal to their opponents that the attacks must end. This white flag is a symbolic image. Its value does not depend on whether it is “true” or “false”. What matters is what the white flag communicates and the effect it produces in this specific context. Using a white flag in battle is an act of visual trust, since this image in employed with the hope or expectation that it will change the course of events, although there is no guarantee that it will.
Cited articles:
Canals, R. 2022. “Visual Trust”, Anthrovision [Online], 8.1 http://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/6945; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/anthrovision.6945
Argudo-Portal, V., & Canals, R. (2025). Anticipatory images: Visual depictions of the not-yet and the politics of temporality. Media, Culture & Society, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437251360376
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