“Truth in photography is an elusive notion” filmmaker Errol Morris writes in his collection of four essays on the mysteries of photographs. “There may not be any such thing.” In teasing out the value of photographic evidence from “staged” Crimean War photographs to the Abu Ghraib snapshots that were the centre of his film Standard Operating Procedure, Morris is as interested in how we come to believe we know the facts as much as the facts themselves. Images pop into this text with the editorial timing of his documentaries and the director, who has profiled numerous eccentrics over the years, may be this paper film’s shadow subject.
Believing Is Seeing begins, obsessively enough, as two lines from a Susan Sontag book send Morris to Crimea to recreate a famous, and contested, war photograph. In an essay about the selection and framing that went into the Farm Security Administration work by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, Morris states that photographers themselves, since the beginning of their technology, have set up impossible rules “to bring a photograph into correspondence with reality.”
For Morris, photographs like Arthur Rothstein’s “prop” steer skull in a drought plain, or in another essay, an AP wire photo of a doll in Lebanese rubble, don’t disturb us with their hint of deception. It’s rather that uncomfortable ideas are successfully telegraphed that make us react with incredulity or accusations of propaganda and artfulness. The questions not asked: Is a whole part of the country dying? Was that a legitimate bombing target or not?
“Staging” is a smear that a photojournalist to this day will never recover from, yet all the decisions that go into taking a photograph—framing, focal points—create bias in seconds. Morris has a vested interest in arguing that why we take to a photograph is as revealing as how it was taken. His approach to filmmaking, playing with restaging and stock footage, is still quite radical and in defiance of traditional non- fiction ideals. According to The New York Times (the paper in which these essays originally appeared) Morris was criticized for paying several of the convicted guards behind the Abu Ghraib images for appearing in Standard Operating Procedure. Did that make the film, some asked in the article, less real?
If you doubt Morris’s argument in Believing Is Seeing that images are never real or unreal, just our inferences from them are real or unreal, allow me to add that I couldn’t help myself from checking: The same paper, only months later, praised the fictional Iraqi War film The Hurt Locker for its “realism.”
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Brian Joseph Davis is Toronto Standard’s Book Critic. He also is the author of Portable Altamont and I, Tania, and co-founder of the literary website Joyland.
