"Believing Is Seeing: Truth, Lies and Photographs" book

[NUKELIES]

From https://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller ... _is_seeing

I found this article and website very irritating due to its excessive cleverness, but it opened my eyes to the easily falsifiable nature of photography.

md_horiz.jpg (67.89 KiB) Viewed 333 times

"Believing Is Seeing": Truth, lies and photographs
The director of "The Thin Blue Line" investigates five famous accusations of photographic fraud

They knew they were right: That phrase (with apologies to Anthony Trollope) could serve as a tag line for the collected works of director Errol Morris, the maker of such classic nonfiction films as "The Thin Blue Line" and "The Fog of War." People often find support for their claims of perfect certainty in photographic evidence, and who better to point out the rickety nature of such "proof" than a master of images and their slippery charms?

Morris has worked both as a private investigator -- the archetype of the truth-seeker in American pop culture -- and a director of television commercials -- pretty much the opposite. His first steady work as a writer, however, came from the New York Times Op-Ed desk, which hired him as a contributor to its Opinionator blog a few years ago. The essays collected in Morris' new book, "Believing Is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography)," have been adapted from those posts and handsomely mounted in an image-rich hardcover. Morris considers five instances in which photographs were seized upon as testimonials to the truth; in all but one case, that testimony was later challenged.

The photographs are famous: Roger Fenton's 1855 images of the Crimean War, particularly the desolate moonscape titled "Valley of the Shadow of Death"; the snapshots taken by soldiers in Abu Ghraib during the Iraq War; pictures of a sharecropper's cabin taken by Walker Evans in collaboration with James Agee during the 1930s and published in the book "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men"; an AP photo of a child's toy lying in the rubble after the 2006 Israeli bombing of Tyre in southern Lebanon; and an ambrotype of three children found on the otherwise unidentifiable body of a Union soldier killed in the Battle of Gettysburg.

In each case, Morris presents his readers with a photograph that seems eminently intelligible. We know what we're seeing and we think we know what it means. Then Morris ushers us behind the scenes and into a world of tangled doubt. Why are there cannonballs strewn on the road in one version of Fenton's photograph and none in another taken during the same 90-minute period? Which image came first, and who was responsible for either removing the cannonballs from the road or scattering them over it? And why did whoever did it, do whatever it was they did? Whew. Accompanying Morris on his quest is simultaneously bewildering and thrilling, like finding a fathomless secret world hidden behind the seeming simplicity of everyday life.

Provoked by Susan Sontag's serene conviction that Fenton "staged" the best-known "Valley of the Shadow of Death" photograph by moving the cannonballs onto the road, Morris decided to investigate. This entailed flying to the Crimea and searching out the exact position of Fenton's tripod in order to ascertain which direction the camera was facing when the photos were taken, then bringing in several experienced image analysts to scrutinize and compare the shadows in each photograph to determine which one was shot later in the day. That turned out to be even more involved than it sounds. Having followed this rabbit hole to its furthest reaches, perhaps it's only natural that the investigators found themselves nicknaming rocks -- Esmerald, Lionel, Marmaduke -- and even exclaiming, as one expert did when presented with Morris' contemporary shot of the site, "Oh my god. There it is! That's Marmaduke."

I won't spoil the results of Morris' inquiry, but for him it provokes ruminations on the nature of documentary and journalism. Ben Curtis, the AP photographer whose image of a Mickey Mouse doll amid the rubble of a destroyed residential tower in Tyre is the subject of another chapter, describes being unwilling to slightly reposition the toy even though that would have made for a better composition. Nevertheless, he was pilloried by bloggers who accused him, as Morris writes, "of deliberately placing the toy in the war zone." Ironically, both sides charged Curtis with producing propaganda for their opponents.

Seventy-five years ago, Arthur Rothstein, working as a documentarian in the Dust Bowl for the Farm Security Administration, didn't know any better than to take several shots of a steer's skull in a parched South Dakota field, repositioning it each time (within a 10-foot radius) until he got one he liked. This prompted Dakota boosters and New Deal critics to denounce the results (released to newspapers by the federal government) as "phony." Morris points out that "the photographs led the viewer to infer that the Dakotas were experiencing a severe drought. But the Dakotas were experiencing a severe drought," a fact nobody contested.

Conundrums like these are highly pertinent to Morris' own work. The juxtaposition of dramatized segments with traditional documentary footage in "The Thin Blue Line" contributed to making that film ineligible for an best documentary feature Oscar in 1988. It's not that Morris doesn't believe in truth, he'd just like to remind us that, when it comes to photographs, we see what we expect to see rather than what's actually there (hence the book's title). The idea that a photograph presents us with objective information about the world is delusional, partly because a photograph reflect the beliefs of the photographer, but mostly because until we surrender that delusion, we can't stop the image from reflecting our own beliefs. "Truth in photography is an elusive notion," Morris tells Curtis at last. "There may not be any such thing."

Further reading:

Visit Errol Morris' website to learn more about his work and view some of the television commercials he's directed

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More: Laura Miller

[rerevisionist]

[Note inserted 4 Feb 2015: Of course paintings, drawings, woodcuts have been used for misinformation, propaganda etc too - rerev]

This book is due on 1 Sept 2011 - this is pre-publication promotion. I looked on Amazon for reviews, and there are none yet, but it's open for pre-orders. Let's hope the book's OK. Morris made a film about Fred Leuchter, clearly intended to make him out as a bit of a clown, and equally clearly with not one single sequence on real gas chambers in the USA.

I found another review, I think written about a review copy (send me one if you like!):-

In Believing Is Seeing Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris turns his eye to the nature of truth in photography.
. . . During the Crimean War, Roger Fenton took two nearly identical photographs of the Valley of the Shadow of Death-one of a road covered with cannonballs, the other of the same road without cannonballs. Susan Sontag later claimed that Fenton posed the first photograph, prompting Morris to return to Crimea to investigate. Can we recover the truth behind Fenton's intentions in a photograph taken 150 years ago?
. . . In the midst of the Great Depression and one of the worst droughts on record, FDR's Farm Service Administration sent several photographers, including Arthur Rothstein, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans, to document rural poverty. When Rothstein was discovered to have moved the cow skull in his now-iconic photograph, fiscal conservatives-furious over taxpayer money funding an artistic project-claimed the photographs were liberal propaganda. What is the difference between journalistic evidence, fine art, and staged propaganda?
. . . During the Israeli-Lebanese war in 2006, no fewer than four different photojournalists took photographs in Beirut of toys lying in the rubble of bombings, provoking accusations of posing and anti-Israeli bias at the news organizations. Why were there so many similar photographs? And were the accusers objecting to the photos themselves or to the conclusions readers drew from them?

My Review:
For most people who look at articles in the newspapers, magazines or even books, when a picture accompanies them we are often looking at that picture and forming an opinion. Hand in hand with whatever the article states, we may buy into the story because what is being written about and what the picture show make a match in our brain. However what Errol Morris does in the book, Believing Is Seeing, is show a picture with the proposed article and how at times in history, they have been made to appear as though they were real, when in fact they were an image created to tie into the story.
. . . These are created to help influence what we read and what we see, so that the audience is more prone to believe it based not just on what they read but also what they see, even though at times the images are created and not really what is happening.
. . . Errol Morris uses many such examples of photos [how many? - rerev] with one being a cow skull show over a dry and cracked land. In the article that accompanied the picture, the reader was made to believe that this photo was taken to show what was happening in the Dust Bowl era in order to get people to buy into Franklin Roosevelt's programs to aid the farmers even though the photo was staged.
. . . I received this book compliments of TLC Book Tours for my honest review and found the book an interesting read. Its hard to imagine that this type of marketing happens to use photos to pull at the emotional heart strings of people, but if it works, they will use it. Many such examples are shown through the book along with commentaries explaining how it was used. I would rate this a 4.5 out of 5 stars.

[rerevisionist]

https://www.codoh.com/found/fndgcffor.html

is an interesting shortish piece with illustrations by Ugo Walendy, showing fakes used to bolster the 'holocaust' fraud.