Canon's Decoy: Six Photographers, One Man, Six Different Stories

Six professional photographers were each given ten minutes with the same middle-aged man and asked to make his portrait. The catch: every photographer was told a different, invented life story about him. One heard he was a self-made millionaire, another that he had been in prison, another that he was a psychic. The six portraits that came back look like six different people.

The experiment was called Decoy. It was made in 2015 by the agency Leo Burnett Sydney for Canon Australia, as part of a series of creative tests on photographers that Canon called The Lab. The man at the centre of it was an actor, introduced in the film only as Michael. None of the stories was true.

What happened in the Decoy experiment

Each photographer arrived believing they would be shooting one specific person. According to Canon's own description and the coverage that followed, the six briefs were:

• a self-made millionaire
• a man who had saved someone's life
• an ex-inmate
• a commercial fisherman
• a recovering alcoholic
• a self-proclaimed psychic

Michael played along, answering questions in character. The photographers then made their choices about light, angle, distance, background and expression. The film below shows the sessions and the reveal, when each photographer learns that their colleagues were photographing "someone else" in the same chair.

Canon closed the film with a single line that sums up the point it wanted to make: "A photograph is shaped more by the person behind the camera than by what's in front of it."

How a backstory changes a portrait

Watching the sessions, you can see the stories turn into technique. Each brief suggests a mood: success and polish for a millionaire, toughness or regret for an ex-inmate, mystery for a psychic, warmth and courage for a man who saved a life. Lighting, pose, the direction of the gaze and the choice of a close or distant frame all follow from that mood, and the finished portraits sit far apart even though the face never changed.

None of this is cheating. Portrait photography has always been interpretation. A photographer studies a face, decides what they think is true about it and then uses every tool they have to bring that out. Here the "truth" they were working from was fiction, so the tools made the fiction visible.

That is why the results feel so uncomfortable. We tend to treat photographs as evidence, as if the camera simply records what is there. Decoy shows how much of a portrait is decided before the shutter is pressed.

What psychology says about first impressions

The experiment is a staged ad, not a scientific study: six photographers, one subject and no control group. But the effect it dramatises is well documented.

Psychologists have a name for one version of it, the halo effect. Edward Thorndike described it in 1920 after noticing that army officers who rated a soldier highly on one quality tended to rate him highly on everything else too. A single overall impression was colouring every judgment. The reverse, where one negative label drags everything down, is sometimes called the horn effect.

Later research found the same pattern with appearance and labels. In a well-known 1974 study by Landy and Sigall, the same weak essay received noticeably better marks when readers believed it was written by an attractive woman. In Decoy, the label came first and the "evidence" was created to fit it.

Why the ad divided viewers

Not everyone loved the film. Some critics pointed out that it borrowed the tone of earlier social-experiment ads, such as Dove's Real Beauty Sketches, which set viewers up for a lesson about prejudice. Many people watched Decoy and concluded that the photographers had stereotyped the man.

Canon's intended message was gentler and more about craft. A writer for Campaign Asia argued that the ad never quite made that shift, so the photographers looked judged rather than celebrated. Both readings are fair. The photographers did exactly what good portraitists do, and the result still shows how easily a story we are told becomes the story we tell.

What it means for everyday judgments

Most of us are not portrait photographers, but we build pictures of people all the time. A colleague warns you that the new manager is "difficult". A neighbour mentions that someone down the road "has a past". By the time you meet that person, you are already looking for proof.

A few habits help:

• Notice where your impression came from. Was it something you saw yourself, or something you were told?
• Ask the person directly. Their own account may be very different from the version that reached you.
• Look for evidence against your first idea, not only evidence for it.
• Be careful with labels you pass on. Like the briefs in Decoy, they shape what the next person sees.

The lesson for photographers and viewers

For photographers, the film is a reminder that research and conversation before a shoot really do change the result, which is why good portraitists spend time getting to know their subject. It also suggests that the most honest portrait might come from arriving with as few assumptions as possible.

For the rest of us, it is a useful way to look at any portrait, news photo or profile picture. Ask who made it, what they believed about the person and what they wanted you to feel. The face in front of the camera is only half the picture.

Six photographers, one man and six different people: Decoy is a short film, but it makes a lasting point about how quickly a story turns into what we think we see.

Sources: My Modern Met: Canon Decoy experiment; Campaign Asia: Canon fails to drive home message of social experiment; PetaPixel: Canon's The Lab series; Wikipedia: Halo effect; earlier coverage by Educate Inspire Change. Video and portrait: Canon Australia / Leo Burnett Sydney.

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