Figure 1 – 1937 “Spy” photograph purporting to show Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan, in the Marshall Islands after their crash landing. From the US National Archives and in the public domain.

Now almost 180 years after the birth of photography, it remains the case that seeing is believing. Indeed, this simple adage can define the use and abuse of photography, especially in a digital age. This coming Sunday the History Channel will air a new special, “Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence.”  Legendary aviator Amelia Earhart disappeared 80 years ago. But, we are told, a newly discovered photograph taken by a “spy” in the Marshall Islands suggests that she survived the ill-fated round-the-world flight only to die at the hands of the Japanese, although the Japanese government has no record of this. The picture is shown here as Figure 1. The photograph shows a woman seated on the dock with her back towards us, sporting Earhart’s signature pants and short-cropped haircut and who resembles Earhart, and a man facing the camera appears to be her navigator, Fred Noonan. If all this is true, then we’ve solved one mystery only to create 100 more.

I am looking forward to the show; so I won’t opine on the subject, except to comment on its symbolism in terms of the meaning of a photograph. Photographic evidence is eclipsed only, perhaps, by modern day DNA forensics. Seeing remains dominant to believing. And the limits of belief lie buried in the optics and grains, which define photographic resolution. Resolution is an ultimate limit to the eye. We can see it, or we cannot. It is a lot like the Heisenberg uncertainty theorem in quantum mechanics and its close-relative impressionist pointillism. Ultimately grains, pixels, and lens resolution set limits on human certainty.