“The Photographic falsifier holds up not a mirror to the world but a looking glass through which the observing subject is slyly invited to step, like Alice, into a place where things are different--where facts seem indistinguishable from falsehoods and fictions and where immanent paradox continually threatens to undermine established certainties.”

-William J. Mitchell (The Reconfigured Eye, 1992)

To suggest the camera flash as objective would be a difficult position to defend.  Its very nature is temporary and altering: the production of light that is ultimately too short to comprehend and only truly exists within the world captured by the camera.  The moments it allows the camera to capture are mere fractions of a second, moments that cannot be recorded by any other means or understood within our own understanding of time. 

It is, however, this very same phenomenon that makes the photograph illuminated by flash so very intriguing to scrutinize.  Moments that were only a mere fraction of continuous time become significant for no other reason than the fact that they were captured by a camera (it could have very well been slightly before or slightly after). 

One could suggest that each such photograph, illuminated by the bright light of the flash, is in effect the construction of a virtual world; one that never would have existed where it not for the camera that had created it.