Stories about iconic photos enthrall me. Looking closer and understanding the world outside the frame reveals that the "truth" of a photograph is rarely as it appears. What didn't get captured is infinitely more detailed and nuanced that what did, and the intent of a photograph and its maker can be entirely a viewer's projection. Unlike other art forms, photography allows an instant to occupy a much larger place in our consciousness than it deserves. Complexly, the frozen and fictional ideal of a photo can still convey a truth, even if it's not the truth.
This Ian Jack article in More Intelligent Life tells the story behind and beyond a well-known British "toffs and toughs" photo from 1937. Short version: while the class differences it's commonly called on to illustrate are largely true, the image is a fiction: the boys on the right were middle-class, not "toughs," and, what's more, lived longer and happier lives than the young "toffs" (who dressed this way once a year for the Eton-Harrow cricket match) on the left.
Some weeks ago, I read Geoff Dyer's marvelous and idiosyncratic survey of the history of photography, The Ongoing Moment. Dyer -- who doesn't even own a camera -- presents the parallels in subject matter among several generations of photographers, who shot and reshot subjects as varied as blind beggars, brooms in doorways, abandoned gas stations, and crushed fedoras. Dyer uses these to illustrate the ideas and techniques used by the great photographers in a thematic rather than chronological way. Though Dyer's main focus isn't truth, the stories around the photos remind us that what we see is an artifact of circumstance, not a reality.
The champion of looking beyond the frame is Errol Morris, whose New York Times blog is deeply fascinating and illuminating. Morris (otherwise a documentary filmmaker) finds a lot hidden in plain sight within the photographs he examines. While gathering expert opinions and following educated hunches, he's explored the position of cannonballs in a road in Crimea, an abandoned toy amidst rubble in Lebanon, cow skulls and alarm clocks in the Dust Bowl, and an unknown soldier's unknown children. 
Morris's most extensive journey outside the frame must be his movie Standard Operating Procedure, which reveals the humans we can't see around the infamous images of torture and humiliation in Abu Ghraib. (His earlier movie The Thin Blue Line uncovered the unsolid truths behind the evidence and testimony that sent a drifter to jail for murder. His movie set a wrongfully convicted man free -- now there's effective art.)
Morris searches for truth and lies and displays how a photograph (and its caption) acts as an authority that makes us unconsciously accept a simple story. We forget to question whether what gets presented to us is real, and we stay unaware of the fuzziness of ideals like truth and dishonesty. In his words:
The idea that photographs hand us an objective piece of reality, that they by themselves provide us with the truth, is an idea that has been with us since the beginnings of photography. But photographs are neither true nor false in and of themselves. They are only true or false with respect to statements that we make about them or the questions that we might ask of them.
The photograph doesn’t give me answers. A lot of additional investigation could provide those answers, but who has time for that?
Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but there are two words that you can never apply to them: “true” and “false.”
