memyselfandhim

I’m very excited to read the new Errol Morris book Believing is Seeing. It’s based on a series of posts Morris did for a New York Times blog. I have read a number of the posts, which were fascinating and exhaustive, and as a Times book reviewer noted, lie “just to the pleasurable side of tedium.” Morris is interested in quite simply (and broadly) 

… the relationship between photographs and reality.

In his blog posts, and now the book, Morris dissects various photographs, most of which are iconic, trying to debunk common perceptions or myths about them. In the process I was reminded that our current disrespect, or even disgust, at “photoshopping” ostensibly documentary photos is perhaps unfairly singular; ALL photos are edited in some way or another, and this is true from the time of the very first photos back in the 1800s. When a photo is taken the choice about what to keep in the frame and what to keep out, when to shoot the photo, which photo of a series to publish or make public, cropping, lighting, developing, all have significant effects, in many cases just as influential (if not more so) than digital retouching, on the final photo we see. Photos are, of course, most definitely not reality. And their danger is that they often so convincingly seem to be.

More and more, we are living in a world of photographs and video. Most of the events we experience today are not “live” and in person but mediated through these images. (And even when we are experiencing events live, in person, we often are recording them at the same time anyway, which alters the experience.) Morris’s deep explorations into the complexities and distortions of photographs is an important primer to help train us to be more critical of the images that dominant our perceptions, indeed our experience of life today.