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Maybe the easiest way to summarize the problem with photos that are “made” rather than “taken” is the fact that, as communications, the made photographs are lies.
I remember a passage in the book Black Boy by Richard Wright. In it, Richard’s grandmother condemns all fiction as lies and Devil Stuff. It’s an extreme view and wrong because a lie is in the intent. When I read a work of fiction, I never think that the book intends to report a factual situation. It may convey the ideas of the author, have multiple levels of meaning, and so on…but I don’t read fiction and confuse it with fact.
The problem with the ease of digital editing is best summarized by the Dove Soap commercial I posted on Tuesday. The photograph in the commercial is portrayed as fact, as if the woman in the photograph is real. This, as Granny would say, is Devil Stuff….or at least it’s a lie.
This isn’t a problem when I walk into an art gallery because, as with a book of fiction, I am aware that the images I’m seeing aren’t simply an attempt to record a moment and place in time. The images are likely to be created with an intention to make me think on “multiple levels.” But when I look at the front page of a newspaper and see a photograph of a politician speaking at a podium, I don’t expect that intent exists…so if the photograph has been altered, then I have been shown a lie.
I think Granny’s oversimplification is silly and dangerous. I don’t think that “truth” exists in the way she suggests. Still, I do think that photography is an interesting problem for us.
Because of the technical and mechanical processes that create a photograph, there is a suggested objectivity that doesn’t exist in writing or human recollection…but that objectivity really doesn’t exist.
I’ll pause here because I think I’m going to re-read Carl Barthes’ Camera Obscura over the weekend. He summarizes this problem better than I can, so I’ll find a few good quotes from there for Monday morning.
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