Roger Canals: Visual Trust Across Society, Science, and Religion

What leads people to trust certain images more than others – or to distrust them?
How do visual reliability and deception change in the age of artificial intelligence?
What forms of visual evaluation can be observed in science, religion, artificial intelligence, and documentary photography?

The lecture by Roger Canals offers insight into an experimental and comparative research approach and presents the key guidelines as well as initial findings of the European Research Council–funded project Visual Trust. Reliability, Accountability and Forgery in Scientific, Religious and Social Images (2021–2027).

Using visual, collaborative, and experimental methods, this interdisciplinary project examines how people from different sociocultural contexts engage with images, develop trust or mistrust, and how images structure social relationships, interpretations, and responsibilities.

The project brings together a wide range of visual materials, including photojournalistic images, digital forgeries, religious icons, AI-generated images, astronomical imagery, and medical imaging.

The lecture is complemented by the presentation of selected visual outcomes of the project, including films and visual essays.

About the Speaker

Roger Canals (*1980, Barcelona) is an anthropologist, filmmaker, and full professor of social anthropology at the University of Barcelona. He is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator project Visual Trust. Reliability, Accountability and Forgery in Scientific, Religious and Social Images (2021–2027).

He is the author of numerous scholarly articles and several books, including The Image that Never Ends. A Journey through Visual Anthropology (Berghahn Books, 2025). As a filmmaker, he has produced internationally award-winning works, including The Many Faces of a Venezuelan Goddess (2007), A Goddess in Motion (2016), Chasing Shadows (2019), and The Color of Spirits (2024).

In 2016, he received the Fejos Fellowship for Ethnographic Film from the Wenner-Gren Foundation (New York). He has also served as a visiting professor at institutions including the University of Toronto, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), and the Institute of Caribbean Studies (Puerto Rico).
In addition, he has curated several exhibitions on documentary photography, ethnographic cinema, and Afro-American culture.