The Guardian - Errol Morris - Truth in photos...?

[Brian Moore]

Errol Morris: 'We've forgotten that photographs are connected to the physical world' - videoWriter and Oscar-winning documentary maker Errol Morris talks about the nature of truth, art and propaganda in photography. Drawing examples from the photographs of Abu Ghraib and the Crimean war, cited in his book Believing is Seeing, he argues we've often underplayed the link between photgraphs and the physical world

Errol Morris: 'We've forgotten that photographs are connected to the physical world' - video | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

 

[Pete Askew]

Excellent find Brian. Thanks. And a number of interesting issues raised there especially the concept of, 'what else is going on?' and, 'why was the image taken?' I am sure that Paul will have great interest in the issues relating to the framing - as indeed do I. You can also flip the whole thing around (maybe he does in his book) and present images that deliberately raise the questions and have no intention of trying to present a truth. Ones that are posed, manipulated and deliberately misleading (or ambiguous). Or where maybe the essential and revealing detail has been left out (by crop or framing - or even manipulation). As I said, interesting stuff indeed. What were your thoughts on this?

 

[Brian Moore]

Thanks Pete. When I was a kid I used to like to play "Spot the Ball". That experience must have pre-disposed me to believe ever since that I need to be careful about what I see in a fotie! They're all lies. Some deliberate, some not. (However, I was a bit disturbed by Mr. Morris's defense of the Abu Ghraib foties and those that posed in them, although his point is well-taken.)

Every fotie, regardless how carefully set up and composed it may be, is merely a snapshot.

 

[Pete Askew]

Yes it was a fairly provocative statement wasn't it. But it does question why we react to those but not to others. Are we reflecting our own outrage or responding to the media presentation of it? Were the questions of why ever addressed? In fact did they need to be raised? Do we really need to analyse these images at a time contemporary with the actions as if they had some sort of hidden meaning? The fact is that people forgot (as they do in every war) where the boundaries are and lost their respect for other human beings (or had it driven out or diluted by what they had experienced). Sadly another example of a professional not behaving professionally and then bleating that it wasn't their fault (soldiers overstepping their authority / power, merchant bankers, politicians). One cannot escape ones responsibilities or ones one moral code. I guess, like so many things it comes down to respect.

Sorry, bit of a random rant there!

 

[Brian Moore]

Are we reflecting our own outrage or responding to the media presentation of it?

The media too often abdicates their responsibilities. In Abu Ghraib, however, they showed us what was going on. A snapshot of what was going on, I should say. And those photos were lies in the sense that they did not give us a full understanding of the environment in which they were taken. But they gave us enough that personal outrage--on an international scale--caused change.

 

[Pete Askew]

Yes that is very true Brian and the outrage was / is fully justified. Hopefully the issue of why it happened has been address by the enquiries but I suspect the focus has been more on who was responsible.

 

[Brian Moore]

but I suspect the focus has been more on who was responsible.

Yes. And it seems to have happened again, with the recent video surfacing that shows marines urinating on dead bodies.

 

[Pete Askew]

Maybe because the 'why' has never been explored do you think? I guess we cannot know.

 

[Paul Lange]

Good find Brian. A topic that has been discussed many times but one that so many people fail to remember when they see the next provocative image. Photographs are an image of something that has been and that is really all you can derive about truth or falsehood from it. The thing is when you talk about photographs and the tiny window of what has been that it shows people often forget that we spend all of our lives only seeing the world through a frame. You could say everyone is happy as the people in your house are all laughing but across the street someone else could be being beaten to death. Their truth is that the world is not such a grate place. If you never knew, never found out about that terrible event is it right to say that everything that you experienced that day was a lie?

 

[Hamish Gill]

fascinating stuff that!