A photograph is a strange sort of thing. I can only point to a handful of practical lessons I've gleaned after four years of collegiate film classes, but one of these is to regard photography with uneasiness and skepticism.

Take for example what's in your field of vision right now. Each Thursday, I open the Daily Cal and find this uncanny phantom situated before me. For some reason, he seems to be contemplating an object outside the visual frame. He looks interested, for sure, but just what is it that fixes his gaze? A bird? A plane? (I'm still trying to parse through that one.)

For the purpose of straightforwardness, I should add that that figure is me-or, rather, a photograph of me. Actually, to be perfectly precise, the image is a duplication of a photograph of me, printed on newspaper after being processed through several computer programs. In any event, I recognize that shirt; it's hanging in my closet, and I'm pretty sure it's mine.

In the summer of 1826, Joseph Nicephore Niepce recorded what historians identify today as the first photograph, a fuzzy view of the outside taken from inside the gentleman inventor's study. Because the primitive exposure process took eight hours, sunlight spans across the entire image. In the first photograph, what we see is an essential distortion of time.

When used in publications, the combination of text with photography typically suggests a simple correspondence. An article details "what happened," and the photograph submits visual verification that what happened "happened." This is what you might call meaning by association, and it offers no guarantee of truth. We would do better to regard photographs as providing no inherent proof of anything, except possibly that someone, somewhere, clicked a camera. And in a wireless world, even that might not be correct.

Photographs travel a dubious path before meeting their target, one made all the more treacherous by the advent of software like Adobe Photoshop. In the digital age, photography is subject to infinite duplication, alteration and intentional manipulation by an unbounded number of sources. As doctored photography becomes more common, it is the job of individuals to regard each image with free-floating skepticism, lest we get lost in perpetual misjudgment and cloud our sense of what's really going on.

I learned my lesson the hard way two weeks ago. On August 29, I was astonished by John McCain's unexpected birthday present to himself-a feisty, fierce Sarah Palin, complete with beehive bow. Starved for information, I scoured the internet until I came upon a post published by leftist blog the Daily Kos that gave birth to a new political crisis known as babygate.

The post alleged that Palin's most recent son, Trig, was really her grandson and that the Palin's orchestrated an elaborate cover-up to switch the mother's identity. Accompanying the detailed article was a series of pictures of Sarah Palin during the end of her pregnancy with no visible baby bump. Of course the evidence was thin and the retelling reeked of heresy. Yet here were these photographs posturing as evidence, a juicy steak for me to feast.

I combed over these photographs for the next couple of days only to realize that my preoccupation was entirely foolish-not because the evidence went one way or the other but because it didn't. The swaddled Alaskan clothing made it impossible to tell whether Palin was hiding a fetus or lacking one. The photographs, as a type of evidence, were effectively neutral. There's an old saying-a picture is worth a thousand words. Use them with care.