A self-portrait made with an Epson flatbed scanner
invites an existentialist's claim -- pictures confound
our attempt to define meaning, identity, and reality.
We hold the likeness of self as irrepressible and undeniable. We look for clues to reassure ourselves that what we see is actually who we are. We hunger for authenticity and self-actualizing records to make ourselves feel whole.
In the persistent visual clutter of our day to day universe we seek images that help us define meaning and rationalize our existence. But the conscious mind may be easily misled. Pictures can indeed lie. Images inculcate us to expect a truth, at least some fragment of it. But what happens when we can no longer count on images as mediators of truth.
The poet Robert Bly wrote, "How much sadness we feel because we have given up expecting truth. Every moment of our lives we exchange comfort or discomfort for statements we know are lies, or mostly lies..."
Bly's idea suggests that we negotiate truths, half-truths and lies -- we settle for what we know as truth because we have little capacity to dispute it. I would extend this argument to images, especially news photographs. In this hyper-mediated world of visual, where pictures increasingly play a role in shaping public perception of the "real", we want to believe that what we are exposed to will be free from the ideological self-interests of those in positions of setting the agenda of public discourse.
As a culture, is there some underlying sense that we have really given up expecting the truth from the things we see?