There you have it David:They are never COMPLETE truths and an incomplete truth, a selected truth, a consciously manipulated truth - IMHO is a lie. A man who shows only the part of the scene that suits his own convictions is, by virtue of exclusion, creating a lie, even without touching a single pixel. That photograph is a lie. You can't leave it up to the viewer to ask the right questions in order to get the whole truth.I don't know what "purely true image" means. To a first approximation, ALL camera-original images are "true". (What they're not, IMHO, is "complete".) An analogy: A man oversleeps. On the way to work he sees a car accident on the other side of the highway. When he get's to work his boss asks him why he's late and he says "There was a terrible accident on the N 42. You should have seen it.. ambulances and fire engines holding up the traffic." The boss says "OK" and walks away I ask you: Was the man telling the truth? To a first approximation. the sentence was true - but he was offering it as an excuse for being late which makes it the worst kind of lie, couched in the truth. If his boss had asked him "Was it on your side of the highway?" he'd have got a better picture. And that's how it is with a photograph. The viewer accepts the image as a representation of what was there at the time. We trust the picture. But it is not trustworthy because it is incomplete - always- there is a lot of information concealed because it never made it into the frame. Thus I propose that a photograph is entirely incapable of telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. herschel |
