In the February Harvard Magazine, Craig Lambert’s “From Daguerreotype to Photoshop” offers a primer on on the tension between the image as pictorial artifact and mirror of reality. The issues are many, but here is one brought to mind, Robert Doisneau’s iconic Le baiser de l’hôtel de ville. As Wikipedia explains

The identity of the couple [kissing] was a mystery until 1993, when Denise and Jean-Louis Lavergne took Doisneau to court for taking the picture without their knowledge. This action forced Doisneau to prove that he actually posed the shot in 1950 using actor/models Françoise Bornet and her then-boyfriend Jacques Carteaud.

AJA