Light colours causing model to fog and shadows to disappear


Hi, basically I am trying to set up a scene with a simple white background for renders, but whenever I make the world background white or even load an existing HDR file, it fogs up the model and you can barely see the shading, and the shadows are completely invisible. I am fairly new to Blender and its probably just some simple setting that needs to be turned on, but everything I’ve tried isn’t working. So why is this happening? It happens in every file I create, from existing models to new files

Also when I load an image texture as a world background it seems to not be showing the full image as well and only showing one pixel of it etc… This is what has happened when I try to load an image texture, I dont understand, I am doing the same as what others are doing in YT videos