“Revealed” implies that there is some sort of single source of truth for the image (as in your book example, where the source of truth is the original book, to

“Revealed” implies that there is some sort of single source of truth for the image (as in your book example, where the source of truth is the original book, to which transcriptions could be compared for accuracy). That is not the case for photography. In film photography, the “latent image” is mere fiction - there is no single image waiting to be revealed. What there is is a bunch of silver salts suspended in gelatin reacting to temperature, electromagnetic radiation, etc. When you want to turn this into an image that the human eye can make sense of, you make them react further with a specific developer/fixer at a specific dilution, in a controlled environment. Changing any of these parameters will lead to a different image, well after the initial exposure was made. In digital photography, you have a set of charge readings, that you then turn into colored pixels following an arbitrary process that can be as complex as you want it to be. You can merely average nearby values and use the result, or run them through a neural network designed to <make colors more accurate | make people look younger | replace trees with sharks | whatever you want> and use the result. Either is a computational process. Now we can certainly draw semantic distinctions, like “this person wasn’t in the picture when it was taken”, or “this person had a pimple on their nose that was removed”. But as mentioned earlier, these are fuzzy and arbitrary. Is a long shot exposure of the Milky Way a “rewritten” image? What about an HDR image? What to make of early digital photography features like red eye removal? (Answer: it doesn’t matter, all photography is the result of a chemical or computational process, and there is no such thing as a “true” image)