Customer Reviews

Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A common question among serious photographers is "what is the truth of a photograph?" Errol Morris, an Academy Award winning documentary film maker, approaches the question in this book.

He does it by examining specific images in six essays, that deal with two similar photographs taken in the Crimean War; the well known photographs of prisoners and GI's at Abu Ghraib prison; several photographs taken by the photographers of the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression; an image of a child's toy in war-torn Lebanon; and a photograph of children found in the hand of a dead soldier at Gettysburg. His method is similar in all cases; he researches the background of the images and reports apparently verbatim interviews that he had with various people involved with the photographs.

His handling of the Crimean war images is a paradigm of his method. The late public intellectual Susan Sontag attacked a photographer of that conflict who had taken two images of a road, one with canon balls in a gully, and the same view with the canon balls on a road. Morris faults Sontag for accusing the photographer of setting up the latter image, and recounts his own efforts to learn which picture was taken first. After interviewing many experts with no success Morris made a trip to the Crimea and determined that the photographer was facing north. With this information in hand, a forensic scientist was able to determine which photograph was the later.

The author raises many questions, including how and why the difference, and dances around the question of whether the second photograph should be considered a fake. Morris never really answers the question. To thoughtful photographers and philosophers the information that he provides will be enough for them to reach their own conclusions. In a work designed for a popular audience this vagueness is unwarranted. Most readers will require a little bit more than just the facts the author discloses (and certainly might have benefitted from a few more answers, like that of the photographer's motivation and some deeper discussion of the ethical questions). Add to that the lengthy quoting of often irrelevant interviews, especially with people who may have had a special axe to grind, and most readers may wonder what the essay was about.

To be fair, the author does not purport to offer a full blown argument about truth in photography. As he says, these are merely observations.

That doesn't mean that some of the stories are not interesting for side details. I had long admired Dorothea Lange's photograph, "Migrant Mother" showing the drawn face of what I believed was a victim of the dustbowl. I was astonished by the present day photograph of the women and her three daughters, all looking well-fed and prosperous. Similarly, I was filled with distaste for the story of the grey-principled doctor who took advantage of the photograph of children that was found in the hands of the dead Civil War soldier.

On the other hand I was astonished that the conclusion of the exploration of Abu Ghraib photographs was to raise the question of who was responsible for the murder of a victim shown in one of the photographs. The question certainly is important but it was raised unexpectedly out of a discussion which made the issue seem peripheral. Perhaps that was the intention of the author, but it certainly made what had gone before in the essay seem poorly crafted.

For the most part, however, I was disappointed that the author, after promising to explore the truthfulness of photographs and their impact on society, could let his arguments lapse into question marks.

Morris makes documentaries, and this is definitely a book written by a documentarian, which is not entirely a criticism. There are a lot of transcripts of long exchanges between him and people he calls up to talk to about various photos (which is actually not how he does his documentaries, where you almost never hear his side of the interview). The most interesting chapters of the book are about Abu Ghraib photos--what does it mean to misidentify the famous hooded man, as the NYT did? Given that the man they misidentified was also imprisoned, was also tortured, why focus on whether the picture was of him? What about the photos of US military personnel smiling and giving thumbs-up signs in front of humiliated prisoners? When we see a social smile, we think it indicates pleasure even when it instead represents discomfort with nowhere to go. Morris has a lot of important stuff to say about framing, reality, and how we shape the meaning of images; he also has a lot of stuff to say about how he figured out which of two pictures of a battlefield was taken first, where a less obsessive person would have given you the answer and the reasoning without telling you all about all the unsuccessful attempts to figure it out in other ways.

One of the most addictive, fascinating collection of essays I've ever read... Errol Morris makes deceptively simple observations about the nature of photography, and then allows those observations to take him (and us) deeper down the philosophical rabbit hole than we could possibly expect. His obsessive, driven sleuthing occasionally creates a strange kind of riveting suspense, making this book easily the equal of his greatest, most entertaining film work. Get it!

Errol Morris has used his camera to satisfy his curiosity and to pique ours. He has made documentaries such as _The Fog of War_ which interviewed the rueful Vietnam War administrator Robert McNamara, and _Standard Operating Procedure_ which investigated the truths revealed (or not) in the photos of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. His _The Thin Blue Line_ was a brilliant investigation of a wrongly convicted death-row inmate in Texas, and it meticulously recreated the supposed crime from different viewpoints. When it came time for the 1988 film to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary, the Academy declined to do so; Morris had staged recreations of the crime, you see, so it wasn't really a documentary. So Morris ought to have good ideas about how photographs work, and what makes them true and what makes them false. He puts those ideas within four connected essays in _Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography_ (The Penguin Press), a handsome book, fittingly well-illustrated, of detailed examination of specific photographs, some famous and some obscure, to show how they inform or mislead us. Each chapter serves up an image that seems almost self-explanatory, and then Morris meticulously dissects it, calls in experts, and uncovers a tangled world of contingencies and eventual mysteries that we cannot fathom. It is a disconcerting exercise; what the photographs mean seemed so obvious. But Morris has reminded us: "_Nothing_ is so obvious it is obvious." Each chapter beautifully illustrates this aphorism.

The first photographs examined are two that come from the Crimean War. Each is taken from the same spot with camera fixed on a tripod on a day in 1855. They show a road near the site where the Light Brigade charged, and they are nearly identical. However, in one photo (called here "OFF") there are cannonballs in a gully to the side of the road, and in the other (called here "ON") the cannonballs are scattered on the road itself. Susan Sontag commented on the two photographs, saying that the photographer, Roger Fenton, had moved the cannonballs onto the road to make the admittedly horrific shelling seem more photographically dramatic. Morris wanted to know how Sontag knew so much about what Fenton was doing, or if he had actually done it, and even if the photographs were in the sequence OFF then ON. Morris not only flew to the Crimea to look at the site (it is remarkably unchanged although cannonballs are long gone), but he got an earful from experts, one at the Victoria and Albert Museum who says Fenton moved the cannonballs, and another at the J. Paul Getty who says he did not, and one at the Metropolitan who says that soldiers could have moved the cannonballs from the road not only to clear it but to have them ready for pickup and refiring at the enemy who sent them originally. This would put ON before OFF. The beauty in this section, and in the others, is joining Morris in a wide-ranging and obsessive quest. He quotes at length his interviews with his experts. He even uses "software routinely used by gaffers (lighting technicians) in the motion picture business" to evaluate the Sun's position as it moved across the sky on 23 April 1855, causing the shadows of the cannonballs to move. In the end, it is gravity that gives the answer about which photo came first, but why the cannonballs were moved is a moral question we can no longer ask the photographer. Then Morris has another, more vital question; no one doubts that this campaign was vicious, but even if Fenton did move the cannonballs to demonstrate it: "Why does moralizing about `posing' take precedence - moral precedence - over moralizing about the carnage of war?"

There are two chapters devoted to photographs from Abu Ghraib, one that analyzes the work of photographers who were part of a Depression-era New Deal agency, one devoted to the photograph of a Mickey Mouse doll abandoned in a glass-strewn street of apartment buildings in Lebanon, bombed-out by Israeli air strikes, and one to a photograph found on a soldier's body at Gettysburg. Morris writes, "Today, possibly because of Photoshop and other photography-doctoring software, people have become suspicious of photographs. This is a good thing." None of the case studies here, however, involve any of that sort of digital rearrangement. People find certainty in photographs, but Morris shows that the certainty is in their minds beforehand, and people consistently see ambiguous photos as increasing the certainty they had before anyway. It may not be as dire a situation as he states it: "Truth in photography is an elusive notion. There might not be any such thing." I am not willing to accept that there can be no photographic truth, and I think Morris's fascinating efforts here show that it can at least be approached, however elusive.

As a beginning amateur photographer myself, I was interested in this book by the title. It turned out to be a thickly written, and yet very readable book. As one reviewer says, the author is obsessed by some of the questions, but in a very good way. The answers, if any, is ultimately left to the readers, as the way it should be. But the author presented enough facts here for a reader to make up his/her own mind. I highly recommend this book, esp for anyone interested in photography, journalism, and psychology.

What I loved about this book is that the analysis of the photographs is done without pretense. The analyses of the images are approached as if they were detective stories- astute questions are asked and different lines of inquiry are followed, like they were forensic cases. Proponents of different points of view get their say, and the book is supported through rigorous research.

That doesn't mean that all questions are answered- in fact often more questions arise than answers. But at least the book takes the reader a level deeper than what's usually already known, inferred, or assumed from simply looking at the photographs in question.

Also as a result of the analyses, insightful observations are made about the underlying nature of photographs and photography in general, which I found useful and inspiring.

Errol Morris is a documentary cinematographer. In this book, he offers up meditations on truth and still photography. His perspective is unremittingly that of a documentarian -- he has very little interest in aesthetic issues in this volume. They may impinge tangentially, as he considers issues of arranging the objects being photographed, but they are never his focus.

The style of the book reminded me of a Studs Terkel book -- he interviews people who have some relationship to each of a half-dozen photographs that comprise the nominal topics for the book's chapters. The interview approach keeps the material accessible and rather chatty, even when it delves into arcana of image processing or forensic analysis of photographs. AFAICS, there is no main point that the book is trying to put forth. Rather, it is a series of ruminations on the topic of photographs as historical (or news) artifacts.

I thoroughly enjoyed the explorations, in the way that I enjoyed the movie "My Dinner with Andre" -- I would have liked to have been present during the interviews, and reading the book is the next best thing. There are times when I was less than convinced of the correctness of points being made -- for example, the big conclusion of the first photographs examined was that it is the accidental and unimportant aspects of a photograph that are the reliable indicator of truth within it. While there may be some validity to that observation, there was also considerable value in the alternative ideas that were examined along the way.

Morris' expectation that there should be one irrefutable standard for establishing truth in a photograph was what was flawed, not the particlar standards that were put forward. The fact that they all led to the same conclusion was a much more reliable basis for believing that conclusion than any one of them in isolation, including the one he finally settled on.

But the value of ths book is not that it presents unassailable conclusions. Rather, it is in the questions with which it chooses to wrestle. If you have any interest in photo journalism, documentary photography, or history, this book will be an engaging exploration of ways in which photography can enlarge our appreciation of historical events and the ways in which it may be an impediment to that appreciation. It is well worth a read.

Morris is the kind of observant skeptic that good photographs deserve. In particular, the first essay on Roger Fenton's two photographs taken during the Crimean War of the same stretch of road, one with cannonballs "off" and one with cannonballs "on," was riveting. Morris's efforts to solve the dilemma presented by the otherwise nearly identical photographs--which one was taken first?--are rewarded by his discovery of a very convincing solution. The solution is, however, complicated for the first-time reader by the fact that the two photographs are mis-captioned as they appear on page 60: the caption for the top photo reads "ON" when it should read "OFF" and the bottom photo's caption reads "OFF" when it should read "ON." This is an unfortunate mistake for an author who is otherwise extraordinarily careful to get words and image right. This is the only such error that I noticed.

This is a well-written work of serious intent. I expect a lot of readers might find it a slog, but the main message is an important one, especially today when we are flooded with images that purport to speak for themselves. My only complaint is that in the analysis of the famous Fenton photographs of the canon balls, the issue of which came first might have been resolved with a little experiment throwing say ball bearings randomly over a scaled-down landscape. The arrangement of canon balls on the raised road surface looks decidedly unlikely. Still, a worthwhile analysis and a good read for anyone interested in documentary photography.

Anyone interested in distortion of truth, the elusive nature of truth, and perception v. reality will love this book,which is filled with photographs, great footnotes, and a winning writing style