An empty road during the Vietnam War. A hilltop landscape in Spain. A nondescript motel balcony in Memphis.

These otherwise ordinary settings are the backdrops to photographs that have become icons of history.

Nick Ut’s Napalm Girl photograph changed American popular perception of the Vietnam War. Robert Capa’s Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death became a potent symbol of Republican resistance against Fascism during the Spanish Civil War. Joseph Louw’s image of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. encapsulated the grief of his followers.

These images went viral long before YouTube and social media. But how does a photograph become iconic? What makes it indelible for generations? What kind of photo not only captures historical events but forever shapes how we view them? What a photograph portrays and what we project onto it are often different things. Photojournalists choose one instant and frame the image as they see fit. Even the best results, the most dramatic results, rarely provide context or nuance.

In the project “Fatescapes,” the visual artist Pavel Maria Smejkal goes a step further and forces us to reconsider the veracity of historical images and the photographer’s role by digitally removing the people that made these images resonant. What is left is the scene as it might have looked just minutes before or after the photographer passed by. These images are reminiscent of a time, before Photoshop, when photographs were believed to be a reflection of reality. Mr. Smejkal’s alterations question whether photographs should be viewed as accurate representation.

Mr. Smejkal, 54, grew up poor in Communist Czechoslovakia, where, he said, his father was persecuted because of his fervent Christian faith. It was a world where people disappeared if their beliefs were too strong and a country, then under the control of the Soviet Union, in which leaders who fell out of favor disappeared even from photographs. His interest in how history is represented stems partly from growing up behind the Iron Curtain and living through the Soviet invasion in 1968.

“I tend to think about historical processes as something really fatal,” he said, “Something much bigger than we are.”

“Fatescapes” examines both the role and limitations of the photographic image as a historical document. “I remove the central motifs from historical documentary photographs,” Mr. Smejkal wrote in an e-mail. “I use images that have become our cultural heritage, that constitute memory of nations, serve as symbols or tools of propaganda and exemplify a specific approach to photography.”

Once an image is in the public sphere, the photographer no longer has any control over how it is interpreted. Eddie Adams, for one, thought that his Saigon Execution photo had been misunderstood, and the general had been demonized for meting out justice on the spot. And serious questions have been raised over the veracity of Mr. Capa’s photo of the militiaman.

Using a simple Photoshop tool, Mr. Smejkal has reshaped these images and challenged us to confront the relationship of photographer, image and history in a manner that is profoundly unsettling. Viewing “Fatescapes” encourages you to wonder if it even matters whether Mr. Adams’s general was misrepresented or if Mr. Capa’s photo was not what it purported to be.

Photographers spend their lives hoping to make an image that will affect how people view the world. Though we may want to think otherwise, those images are rare. If anything, attempting to portray a moment of “truth” is a very tricky business.