Errol Morris, the acclaimed documentary filmmaker, is now blogging for the New York Times.
In a recent article Morris wrestles with the relationship between truth and photography. Morris joins a long list of big thinkers such as John Berger, Susan Sontag, Victor Burgin, Roland Barthes, and many others, who have attempted to explain the impact pictures have in the construction of our conscious reality.
"...Photographs tamper with the glue that holds life and memory together," Morris writes.
For Morris, the underlying issue in terms of a photograph's veracity is always a matter context. The question of whether a photograph is true or false also relies heavily on the words chosen to explain it. Morris appears agitated by how casually people take for granted the contents of a photographs, especially when accompanied by a caption. Morris notes:
"The issue of the truth or falsity of a photograph is only meaningful with respect to statements about the photograph. Truth or falsity “adheres” not to the photograph itself but to the statements we make about a photograph. Depending on the statements, our answers change. All alone — shorn of context, without captions — a photograph is neither true nor false."
As Morris suggests, in order to decipher the meaning of a photograph, with or without words, we must call upon memory for placing what we see within a context of all other things we have seen and known.
Morris is sincere in his attempt to solve one of the more perplexing paradoxes of our visual culture -- how seeing photographs may or may not lead to greater understanding -- to the truth. Even though a photograph cannot be the "truth", it may encourage insight, engender sympathy, or foment outrage.
The only problem here is that often this leads to the assumption that once we believe something and understanding it, we will eventually be persuaded to actually cared about it.
How many times have we assumed that what we see in a photograph is worth believing? After all, the assumptions connected with seeing as believing are; believing as knowing, and knowing as truth.
We live in an age when truth is increasingly suspect. We live in an age of creeping skepticism and incredulity -- an age when our capacity for consciousness and common sense is continually bombarded by the contradictions of an information/representational system (media) that place photographs before us as truth, even when we should know better.
This does not imply that the power and impact of photographs in society are in any way insignificant. Photographs convey what words often fail do to, but they also are objects of something that once was. Then, what we are left to struggle with here is more about our obsession with the visual as an proxy for what truth is and how to think about it.
This is what Morris suggests:
"The idea that photographs hand us an objective piece of reality, that they by themselves provide us with the truth, is an idea that has been with us since the beginnings of photography. But photographs are neither true nor false in and of themselves. They are only true or false with respect to statements that we make about them or the questions that we might ask of them."
We should now better by now, especially in an age of digital fabrications, photo-ops, and YouTube moments. In a sense, a photograph can make the truth appear simple and less complex.
A photograph, in the end, only reduces the world to digestible instances of partial truths -- with and without words.