寫真是日文裡對照片的解釋，日文對於攝影稱作「寫真術」，可說攝影是一種「寫真」的技術，那麼什麼是「寫真」，如果按照字典的意思，寫真代表的是「對事物的如實描繪」，因此「如實描繪」是否為攝影的重點？此時衍生出兩個問題，其一；作為攝影師是否為了寫實，而不帶任何情感的客觀描述現場？其二；攝影師是否應該為了深入描繪，而必須站在被描繪者或任一角度設想的一方？攝影既然為人所屬的自然，非得透過器具才能產生的圖像，本已經屬於人所主觀的影像創作之產生，而因為其影像紀錄的特性，攝影一直被當成是各種行政事務的佐證資料，網路俗語：「沒圖沒真相」，似乎有了攝影所產生出來的影像，其所表述的畫面即是「真實」，但我們如何能正確地去看待這樣的影像？或許可以再從三個角度來觀察攝影本身所代表的真實，第一個真實：「屬於照相機具所看到的局部真實」。第二個真實：「屬於感光元件所記錄的光影與色彩真實」，第三個真實：「屬於攝影師自己所代表的真實」，也就是攝影師的世界。這三個釐清了之後，我們才有可能去還原真實的可能，並去質疑影像背後所代表的意義，體會出更深的影像故事。

In Japanese, shashin (kanji: 写真) means “photo” or “photograph” and shashinjutsu (kanji: 写真術) means “photography.” The kanji characters for photography (写真術) literally mean “a technique that faithfully captures truth” in Chinese. To examine whether photography should focus on faithfully capturing truth, this study investigated the following two research questions: (1) Should a photographer objectively and emotionlessly depict a photo’s subject to capture truth? (2) Should a photographer take on the perspective of a depicted subject or any other person’s perspective to thoroughly depict said subject? Photography, which requires optical equipment to capture images, is artificial in essence and creates images typically from the subjective perspective of the photographer. Photography is also used as a method to present evidence for various administrative tasks because of its applicability to image documentation. The popular Internet proverb “Pics or it didn’t happen” seems to suggests that photo images testify to the truthfulness of reality. How to accurately interpret truth in such images is worthy of investigation. The truth of photography can be observed on the following three levels: (1) partial truth represented by the field of view of the camera, (2) truth represented by the light, shadows, and colors recorded by the image sensor, and (3) truth represented by the photographer (i.e., the photographer’s perspective). Only after these three levels of truth have been clarified can we reconstruct reality and question the meaning behind the photo, thereby developing the ability to interpret deeper meaning from a photographic image.