PHOTOGRAPHY VIEW; Ask It No Questions: The Camera Can Lie

Ever since its invention a shade more than 150 years ago, photography has been seen as a medium of truth and unassailable accuracy. Photographs have been used by scientists to map the planets and identify subatomic particles, by police and prosecutors to solve crimes and convince juries, by newspaper and magazine editors to document events around the world - and few think twice about it. Even everyday snapshots serve as litmus tests of social reality to millions of eyes. In the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, a photograph serves as a ''mirror with a memory.''

Today, however, the veracity of photographic reality is being radically challenged. The immediate menace- although by no means the only one - is known as computer imaging, an outgrowth of electronic technology that allows anyone to alter a photographic image at will. This much-touted technology makes it easy to recompose and combine photographic images, and to do so in a way that is virtually undetectable.

In the future, it seems almost certain, photographs will appear less like facts and more like factoids - as a kind of unsettled and unsettling hybrid imagery based not so much on observable reality and actual events as on the imagination. This shift, which to a large extent has already occurred within the rarefied precincts of the art world, will fundamentally alter not only conventional ideas about the nature of photography but also many cherished conceptions about reality itself.

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