By "lie" I mean that they are not representations of reality--or no more a representation of lived human reality than a painting or a piece of music.  They can explicitly aim to be nothing more than passive recording devices, but how to capture the emotion at the time--so sometimes (I was thinking of a picture DoDo posted of a hill, and melo's shots of sunsets) you have this thing that happened that you want to pass on--unmediated, but there's an obtrusive element that distracts--so there's idealisation.  Then there's our favourite shot of ourselves, the complimentary one--etc.  So "the camera never lies, it just bends truths through the matrix machine while saying, 'yeah, this is the truth, well, this bit, and maybe that bit, and oh--hey!  Did you think of this--look!'"

...as the subject for the photo blog--only more wittily expressed!

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.