One of the biggest reasons the public is more skeptical of photographs now than even 20 years ago relates to the behavior of “light” in photography.

• Viewers fully expect photographs to undergo some “changes that are likely to happen anyway” (“light”-related changes)

• But viewers are naturally more wary of photographs that undergo “changes that never occur on their own” (non-“light”-related changes) — and those are changes that are now possible to make easily, undetectably, and instantly.

In the 19th and 20th centuries,

it was very difficult to make many now-popular non-“light”-related changes — for example selectively moving, blurring, adding, deleting, replacing, reshaping, and resizing “forms and shapes” — without viewers being able to see those changes.

As a result, apart from a few non-“light”-related basics like cropping, back in the film era the vast majority of photos only underwent “light”-related changes — “tones and colors.”

“Light”-related changes had been integral to photography almost from its invention, and in fact the word “photo-graphy” came from the Greek for “light-writing.”

But in the 21st century,

viewers know how easy it is (see #307) for photographers to undetectably perform “changes that never occur on their own” (non-“light”-related changes).

The public is accordingly much more skeptical now about even the most believable-looking images that look like undoctored photographs.
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For more on the role of “light” in making trustworthy photographs, see this brief (also linked in the first sentence above).