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Very good post, Karl. Since photography is a
two-dimensional abstraction of a three-dimensional "reality" and is a
slice out of the time stream I never assumed that it was capturing
"truth". Societal conventions assumed photos as true for their own
purposes. As to your video of the one wing landing question, Snopes.com labels it as false and a fabrication for a commercial concern. Don karl shah-jenner wrote: Lea writes: I have found the first six parts of this seven part blog series absolutely fascinating. You may have to be a NY Times subscriber to access it (I am one so I'm not sure if this will work if you aren't one). It is worth subscribing to just for this article, I believe. http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/the-case-of-the-inappropriate-alarm-clock-part-1/ It's been illuminating. To say the least. thanks for that lea - i got me thinking about this again, the whole photography fake debate A picture appears in a newspaper, a caption underneath (or not) and after a period of time, doubt springs up as to the authenticity of the image - which in turn, casts doubt on the account of events. This is a good thing, and the way it should always be. Worse would be where a picture comes to be considered the fact, and the account is held indisputable on the basis of the photographic evidence.. We are pretty subjective in our interpretation of the world around us, and no matter how hard we try to be objective, there are occasions that confound the best of us.. "the witness stated the offender was wearing a red jumper" - oh wait, the witness is found to be colour-blind and the jumper could have been green. '3 people observed the green car speeding away from the scene' - oh, the street was lit with sodium vapour lamps, so the car could have been blue.. etc. What came to mind was the youtube video floating around of the 'amazing stunt pilot' landing a plane after losing a wing. Immediately after viewing it people seem divided - some respond by saying that it has to be a fake, others are amazed at the pilots flying and landing skills. The first time I saw it I went looking for more information and found hundreds of posts on the web about the video, but no credible statement supporting it's authenticity. I can't be certain enough of anything to say it's real, nor can I personally draw enough information from the video to see anything that screams fake (I suspect it's a fake though ;) The problem is that there's no testimony to the event. In a court, a witness would be called to present their account of events and such a video would be played to the jurors if it was agreed that it was appropriate supporting material to the witness account of events. But there's no way a video should ever be played as 'evidence' without a witness testimony. but newspapers aren't courts. Photographs have always had the power to confuse or illuminate, they have always held truths and lies, but it's our viewing of these images when taken out of context where the fault occurs - because we draw conclusions from what we see, whether we're led to it or left to our own devices. In an alternative reality: an image of Lewinsky and Clinton pops up in a box of old photos one day, the mind would start working (there's a date on the back of the print) and we could immediately draw a conclusion. OR we could say 'this is interesting' and formulate our hypothesis and subsequently start investigating what this photo means - we could be quite entitled to present our hypothesis to the world, but we would NOT be able to present it as a truth of anything without supporting evidence. This would simply be wrong. Black Swan. we know photos can be faked, so there is NO reason to assume truth. However, if a journalist holds up an account of an event and shows a picture we don't really look and ask ourselves - are they showing us supporting evidence "crowd of Iraqi's being protected by soldiers", we assume the account is correct and the photo real - but when we DO discover it's a fake we feel duped, and rightly so. When we discover additional smoke has been added to a scene to evoke an emotional response we feel a fraud has been committed.. because we were in fact tricked into an emotional response we might not have felt had we seen the original But is our impassionate view correct? For the journalist standing in the blistering heat watching great plumes reaching up to the sky, it could seem like hell with thick smoke obscuring everything.. only to find the photo showing something quite different to what HE felt the scene looked like. Would it be right for him to move around to find a scene that more accurately portrays his sense of the way things are, or to maybe tweak it a bit in PS later? I know I do this in my own photos, but then I'm not a reporter. What bugs me the most though is people who have downright lied. I'm not talking of the Eugene Smith's photo composites and high darkrooms skills, which for a 'documentary photographer' are pretty dubious portraits of 'truth' .. but more the likes of Henri Cartier Bresson, who's "decisive moment" occurred more often when looking at a proof sheet of staged shots than in the field. There are countless articles revelling in the virtues of his apparent technique "In the preface to his 1952 book The Decisive Moment .. Cartier-Bresson defined his aesthetic is "the simultaneous recognition in a fraction of a second of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms." . earlier photojournalists commonly staged their pictures. In contrast, Cartier-Bresson practiced unobtrusiveness as the route to capturing unposed photographs." < http://www.nppa.org/news_and_events/news/2004/08/cartier-bressons_impact_on_journalism.html > Bresson says "Photography is not like painting," Cartier-Bresson told the Washington Post in 1957. "There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an _expression_ that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative," he said. "Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever." the Smithsonian has something to say on this http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/indelible_cartier.html?c=y&page=1 "The scrapbook reveals a stage between his shooting and printing of multiple images of the same subjects (1931-46) and his choosing one of each subject for The Decisive Moment. It might be called The I-can't-quite-decide-which-image-looks-more-decisive Moment" I have no conclusions, I just dredge deeper when I see a photo and feel something may not be quite right. karl http://commfaculty.fullerton.edu/lester/writings/faking.html http://blogs.photopreneur.com/the-worlds-most-famous-photoshop-fakes http://www.cracked.com/article/118_the-15-most-shameless-fake-photos-ever-passed-off-as-real/ |
