What can really be learned from an image? Since its origins, how has photography built itself up within a discourse of truth? The book and eponymous exhibition respond to these questions through eleven cases of images produced by experts, researchers and historians.

Whether it be the famous shots of the Shroud of Turin, the legal photographs perfected by Alphonse Bertillon, the first aerial images of the front taken by the army during World War I, the images from the Nuremberg trial, or photos taken with cell phones testifying to the damage of drone strikes on theatres of war in Afghanistan or Israel: forensic images are now part of any police or political investigation.