It seemed unlikely that the Pope would wear a puffer jacket or that Nigel Farage would play Minecraft, but Katy Perry making a big entrance at the Met Gala or Rishi Sunak pouring a bad pint appeared entirely plausible. In fact, all of these images were fake.
"I think it's getting harder to know what is true," says Jago Cooper, the director of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, which is part-way through a six-month series of interlinked exhibitions based around the question What is Truth?

It's a theme that's being taken up by a number of museums. In Maastricht, Fotomuseum aan het Vrijthof's Truth is Dead is currently displaying Alison Jackson's amusingly misleading photographs of celebrities, for example; while Foam Amsterdam is exploring how the intersection of art and technology can change our perception of reality with Photography Through the Lens of AI.

"People genuinely want to know how they know what is true in the world today," says Cooper. "Truth is so hard to find and it's a really interesting question." Unsurprising, then, that it's become a prevalent theme for many contemporary artists, eager to open up conversations about the trustworthiness of visual media.

One such artist is the Irish film-maker and photographer Richard Mosse. His photograph Poison Glen (2012) from The Enclave series features in the Sainsbury's Centre's newest exhibition The Camera Never Lies: Challenging images through the Incite Project. The eastern Congolese landscape in the frame ought to appear as green as the Donegal valley it is named for, but by using infrared film, a device normally intended to reveal information, Mosse has instead deceived us. A landscape populated by armed rebels, who are part of a conflict which has cost over 5 million lives, is turned an inviting sugar pink: the nightmare now looks like a fairytale.

Also in The Camera Never Lies – which re-evaluates the most iconic images of the past 100 years – is Stuart Franklin's The Tank Man (1989). In the photo, a lone protester in Beijing's Tiananmen Square stands in the path of tanks just minutes after the Chinese authorities gunned down anti-corruption and pro-reform demonstrators.