A Little Bit of Everything

This school blog answers the question:

"All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth." Is this true? Support, deny, or qualify this statement.

Richard Avedon was an amazing photographer but was often criticized for taking a person out of contest, throwing them in front of a stark white background and photographing them. His pictures of the “real west” hardly are accurate at all, he handpicked the stereotypes and left out everything else. In response he once said "All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth." You cannot find the truth in photographs. But when something is not the truth it doesn’t mean that it lies. Photos do not lie. Words lie, the eye lies but photos do not lie.

I created a webpage of photos and added captions to explain what they are about- they are all war photography. Take a quick look.

http://adorerodio.angelfire.com/truth/

Those photos told no lies. The camera, an unfeeling machine, clicked and whirred, it flipped the image outside its lens upside down and placed it for better or for worse on a static piece of film. In the process truth was not lost, the scene in front of the camera was transplanted perfectly onto film (except the digital images but it’s still the same concept). But captions lie, words lie. In class many said images are meant to be put with words, the two go together. But words easily lie. They came from a human, a brain given to tendencies, including that of lying. What if I told you those captions were lies in the photos I put on that web page? That photo #1 was really taken in a studio. The baby wasn’t dead, only a model paid to be there. It was used as propaganda to help support the Vietnam War. I lied. And if this is true did the photo lie too? It doesn’t show the truth, it shows a fake world. But the photo didn’t lie, the caption lied, the propaganda offices lied, the photographer lied but the photo didn’t lie. The photo shows the truth, if we choose to believe a lie because we see the photo it is our lie not its.

Photos are known as truth no matter what and the words that accompany them are accepted as truth as well. In WWI photos were always posed far from action without any dead in them to be used as propaganda. The camera couldn’t lie, the photo didn’t lie, but the people behind it did lie. We choose what to accept as reality. James Zumwalt said in his article “How a Powerful Image Can Shape A War” that when the image of the terrorist being shot by a Saigon government official reached America “the American public all too quickly perceived the brutality captured in that one snapshot of the war but failed to grasp its reality. They chose to ignore the brutality of the terrorist's precipitating act to focus only on what they perceived to be the ensuing barbaric act of a Saigon government official.” America chose the truth, making the photo a lie, but it didn’t lie, it wasn’t posed, it was truth. We made it lie by creating the lie in it.

Photographs not only show truth but lead people to truth as well. A photographer by the name of Edward Curtis for 30 years photographed the Indians of the American West. But he began in 1907, when most Native American tribes had been “modernized”, wearing jeans and losing their old culture. This wouldn’t do for Curtis so he took beautiful, romantic pictures to make them glorified legends as they died away. He placed feathered head pieces on their heads and painted their faces. “These striking images, many quite well-known, have been influential in shaping popular views of "Indians." They have been criticized by some -- because Curtis was not an ethnographer, because many of his photos are posed or lack context, and because the work contributed to the mythologizing of Native Americans as a ‘vanishing race.’” (K.Goode) But because of his photographs a man named Frank Matsara took photos of everything, even the Native Americans without glorious headdresses and painted horses. He wanted people to see the truth. Because of him descendants of the Native American people can really know their ancestry, know the truth.

Other photographers photographed images that led people on crusades of truth, and for all that is right. Lewis Hine photographed destitute children working in factories to help the Child Labor Committee. His photos inflamed the hearts of people as no words had succeeded before. Pictures hit the heart, words hit the head. Because photos impact the heart they are believed easily. Gordon Parks took pictures of a black maid named Ella Watson and with his photos helped fight against racism. Danny Lyon’s photos were also used to help Civil Rights by taking photos in the south of segregation and bringing them to the north to bring awareness. In 1945 during the Nuremburg Trials the description of the devastation and the death seemed unbelievable and exaggerated but when photos were presented the atrocities were undeniable. They showed the truth.

But while photos show truth they cannot show the whole truth. No one and nothing can ever be omnipotent or omniscient and therefore cannot know the whole truth. We see a photo of a person grieving and we know the truth that they are in pain but we cannot know the whole truth because “we do not know their grief, only they know that.” No words or photos, no matter how truthful can ever give us that truth. All photos are accurate and all are truth but none show the whole truth.

So you know all the captions on those photos were lies.

Here they are again with the original captions:


http://adorerodio.angelfire.com/real_truth/