What makes an “honest” photograph—a “true” photograph? Is the medium of photography more factual and authentic than other art forms? What makes a photograph “a fake”? Can a photo be objective or does it always have a point of view? When does a photograph document reality? When is it propaganda? When is it art? Can a single photograph be all of these things simultaneously?
These are some of the questions Academy-Award winning film director and MacArthur fellow Errol Morris tackles in his brilliant book Believing is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography). This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the medium of photography and is one of my favorite publications from 2011.
A young Errol Morris with his parents (Photo courtesy Errol Morris from Seeing is Believing)
Morris’s fascination with photography began at a young age. His father died before Morris turned three, so the photographs on display throughout the family’s home were one of his only connections to his father. “In a sense, the photographs both gave me my father and took him away,” Morris explains in the introduction to his book. “Photographs put his images in front of me, but they also acutely reminded me of his absence.”
Morris also reveals that he has limited sight in one eye and lacks normal stereoscopic vision. He blames his bad eye sight on the fact that he refused to wear a patch after surgery for a misaligned eye when he was a boy. In an interesting twist, the man who performed his eye surgery eventually became his stepfather. “My wife Julia calls it a new version of the Oedipus story: my future stepfather blinds me and then marries my mother. If I share anything with Oedipus, it is asking one too many questions.” Is it any wonder Morris is obsessed with the subject of perception?
"There is no correct way to take photographs or to make documentary films, or for that matter to write books," says Morris. "It’s not about correct and incorrect. Truth is something that you seek in what you do. You strive to understand the world around you but it's not guaranteed by style. Using available light or a hand held camera doesn’t make your work any more truthful than anybody else’s work."
Believing is Seeing is part detective story, part philosophical meditation. The essays, which originally appeared in a different form on Morris’ blog on the New York Times website, generated a lot of comment and debate when they first appeared, and for good reason. They are fascinating, provocative investigations into the limitations of looking.
To understand a photograph, Morris argues that we must seize on small details as a way of answering larger questions. The case of Roger Fenton is a good case in point. In 1855 the British photographer took two nearly identical photographs of the Valley of the Shadow of Death during the Crimean War. One photo shows a road covered with cannonballs, and the other shows the same road without the cannonballs.
While reading Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, Morris was struck by Sontag’s claim that the famous photograph of the cannonballs on the road was staged and that Fenton “oversaw the scattering of the cannonballs on the road itself.”
In 1855 Roger Fenton took two nearly identical photographs of the Valley of the Shadow of Death during the Crimean War. One photograph shows a road covered with cannonballs, and the other shows the same road without the cannonballs. Morris asks the provocative question, "Which photograph was taken first?"
Susan Sontag claimed that Roger Fenton posed the photograph with the cannonballs on the road, prompting Morris to return to Crimea to investigate. Is it possible to recover the truth behind Fenton's intentions in a photograph taken 150 years ago?
Sontag’s assertion about Fenton raises more questions for Morris than it answers. He wonders how Sontag actually knew the sequence of the two images? And why does she suggest “a certain laziness on Fenton’s part, as if he himself couldn’t be bothered picking up or putting down a cannonball but instead supervised or oversaw their placement”? And how can Sontag possibly know what Fenton’s motivations were while he was taking the photograph? Morris goes through remarkable (and humorous) lengths to answer these questions, and even returns to Crimea to see what revelations can be uncovered.
Morris reveals similar complexities in the iconic, Depression-era photographs of Farm Security Administration photographers like Arthur Rothstein and Walker Evans. Morris makes a strong case that Walker Evans rearranged furniture and moved objects when documenting the interior of the Gudger family’s sharecropper cabin. Evans’s images were taken for the FSA and also were included in the landmark book Let us Now Praise Famous Men. Morris scrutinizes James Agee’s household inventory from Let us Now Praise Famous Men and compares it to the corresponding photographs taken by Evans. Morris also examines the sequence of Evans’s images and the placement of objects in each sequential frame.
Why did Evans's collaborator James Agee list the objects on the Gudger's mantle in such detail and yet fail to mention the Westclox Fortune No. 10 clock in the center of the mantle? Was the object Walker Evans's own personal travel clock? Did Evans add the alarm clock to the mantle to improve the composition of his image? Did he give the clock to Mr. Gudger, or did the clock belong to the family already? If so, why would the clock be placed on the mantle after Agee made his household inventory? (Image courtesy the New York Times/Walker Evans photo courtesy the Library of Congress)
Some fascinating questions emerge: Why did James Agee list the objects on the Gudger’s mantle in such detail (including small details like a nail file, two large safety pins, and needle and thread), and yet fail to mention the Westclox Fortune No. 10 clock in the center of the mantle?
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