So there I was, reading House of Leaves and procrastinating on my thesis proposal, when I stumbled upon this:

"In 1990 in The New York Times, Andy Grundberg wrote: 'In the future, readers of newspapers and magazines will probably view news pictures more as illustrations than as reportage, since they will be well aware that they can no longer distinguish between a genuine image and one that has been manipulated. Even if news photographers and editors resist the temptations of electronic manipulation, as they are likely to do, the credibility of all reproduced images will be diminished by a climate of reduced expectations. In short, photographs will not seem as real as they one did.'