Then he blended in real documentary images of war into an otherwise scripted story.

Because photographs can show but cannot explain, some images, particularly documentary images, are notoriously dependent on words.

A documentary image can become "a visual symbol, with a meaning extending far beyond the photograph's specific content."

Contemporary documentaries and articles present his photographs as acutely observed documentary images.

The scene stealers are the spots of decay attacking those documentary images.

"Decasia" captures the wearing away of the very documentary images that were supposed to stop time.

"Sometimes," she argues, "we need to face up to real documentary images and hear reports of brutality first-hand", rather than in the theatre.

One shouldn't, however, make the mistake of considering these merely as documentary images.

Nor is the art world so willing as in the past to accept documentary images as factual accounts of the world.

But as is often the case with documentary images, we do not know the whole story here.