Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire - Errol Morris - Zoom - New York Times Blog - The Diigo Meta page

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  • July 10, 2007,  2:14 pm  

    Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

     

    By Errol Morris

     

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    Pictures are supposed to be worth a thousand words. But a picture unaccompanied by words may not mean anything at all. Do pictures provide evidence? And if so, evidence of what? And, of course, the underlying question: do they tell the truth?

     

    I have beliefs about the photographs I see. Often – when they appear in books or newspapers – there are captions below them, or they are embedded in explanatory text. And even where there are no explicit captions on the page, there are captions in my mind. What I think I’m looking at. What I think the photograph is about.

     

    I have often wondered: would it be possible to look at a photograph shorn of all its context, caption-less, unconnected to current thought and ideas? It would be like stumbling on a collection of photographs in a curiosity shop – pictures of people and places that we do not recognize and know nothing about. I might imagine things about the people and places in the photographs but know nothing about them. Nothing.

     

    

     

    This collection could even involve my own past. I recently was handed a collection of photographs taken by my father – dead now for over fifty years. I looked at it, somewhat confused. I suppose saddened by the passage of time. Even though I am in the photographs, the people in them are mysterious, inherently foreign. Maybe because photographs tamper with the glue that holds life and memory together.

  • As disconnected from the present as these photographs might be, they do not seem devoid of context. I know too much about them – even if I know very little. They are pictures of my own family. It’s too easy for me to concoct some story about them. To find a picture shorn of context, it would be important to pick a photograph that’s sufficiently removed for me in time and context – a photograph preternaturally unfamiliar. Perhaps a war photograph, but a war photograph from an unfamiliar war. It should be a war six or seven wars ago. Passions, presumably, have been diminished. No one in the photographs will still be alive.

     

    I want to ask a relatively simple question. Are these photographs true or false? Do they tell the truth?

     

    Look at the photograph below. Is it true or false?

     

    

     

    
    

     

    I find the question ridiculous: “True or false in regard to what?”

     

    Without a caption, without a context, without some idea about what the picture is a picture of, I can’t answer. I simply cannot talk about the photograph as being true or false independently of beliefs about the picture. A captionless photograph, stripped of all context, is virtually meaningless. I need to know more.

  • And yet, this idea that photographs can be true or false independent of context is so ingrained in our thinking that we are reluctant to part with it.

     

    Let’s add a caption to the photograph

  • Only now can we ask questions that have true or false answers. The caption asserts that this is a photograph of the Lusitania, a British ship launched in 1907. I found the photograph on a website entitled “Maritime Quest.” I made no effort to check it; I simply took their word for it. That could be a mistake on my part. With no malice intended, the wrong caption could have inadvertently been placed under the photograph. The photograph could actually be a photograph of the Titanic. Or malice could have been involved. Someone could have maliciously switched the captions of pictures of the Lusitania and the Titanic.

     

    But one thing is clear. When I look at these pictures – whether it is a picture of the Lusitania or the Titanic – I imagine that someone stood on a dry dock, or some vantage point, looked through the viewfinder of the camera, and took a photograph of something that was floating out there in the water. If it was the Lusitania, then he took a photograph of the Lusitania. If it was the Titanic, then he took a picture of the Titanic. This may seem hopelessly obvious, but I have this saying – and I believe there’s something to it – that there is nothing so obvious that it’s obvious.

     

    But we need language, and we need context, in order to know which ship it is, and a host of other sundry facts.

     

    In discussing truth and photography, we are asking whether a caption or a belief - whether a statement about a photograph — is true or false about (the things depicted in) the photograph. A caption is like a statement. It trumpets the claim, “This is the Lusitania.” And when we wonder “Is this a photograph of the Lusitania?” we are wondering whether the claim is true or false. The issue of the truth or falsity of a photograph is only meaningful with respect to statements about the photograph. Truth or falsity “adheres” not to the photograph itself but to the statements we make about a photograph. Depending on the statements, our answers change. All alone — shorn of context, without captions — a photograph is neither true nor false.

  • But why this photograph? It’s so terribly bland. I wanted to begin this series of essays on photography with an image chosen particularly for its blandness. Removed in time, far from our core knowledge, it is unfamiliar. We know little about it. We most likely do not recognize it as the Lusitania. We might think it’s an early-20th-century ocean liner, and perhaps even imagine it may be the Titanic – at which point we have placed a kind of mental caption under the photograph, and we begin to see the photograph in terms of our associations and beliefs, about what it seems to say about reality.

     

    It is also interesting how a photograph quickly changes when we learn more about what it depicts, when we provide a context, when we become familiar with an underlying story. And when we make claims about the photograph using language. For truth, properly considered, is about the relationship between language and the world, not about photographs and the world.

     

    So here’s a story.

     

    On the evening of May 7th, 1915, the RMS Lusitania was off the coast of Ireland en route to Liverpool from New York when it was torpedoed by a German U-Boat and sank. Nearly 2,000 passengers and crew drowned, including 128 Americans. The loss of life provoked America out of a hereunto neutrality on the ongoing war in Europe. With cries of “Remember the Lusitania” the U.S. entered into WWI within two years.

     

    To modern viewers, this image of the Lusitania is emotionally uncharged, if not devoid of interest. But to a viewer in the summer of 1915, it was charged with meaning. It was surrounded many, many other photographs, images and accounts of the sinking of the Lusitania, a cause celèbre.
  • ENLIST” was a WWI Recruitment poster designed by Fred Spears. Spears’ design was inspired by a news report from Cork, Ireland, that described, among the recovered bodies from the Lusitania, “a mother with a three-month-old child clasped tightly in her arms. Her face wears a half smile. Her baby’s head rests against her breast. No one has tried to separate them.”

  •  And here is a photograph from the same period with the following caption.

     

    
    

     

    

     

    “SOME OF THE SIXTY-SIX COFFINS BURIED IN ONE OF THE HUGE GRAVES IN THE QUEENSTOWN CHURCHYARD”

     

    The caption is from a two-page pictorial spread in the May 30, 1915, New York Times: “BURYING THE LUSITANIA’S DEAD AND SUCCORING HER SURVIVORS”.
     
    
     

     

    One more photograph and an accompanying article from the Toronto Star.
     
    

     

    

     

    The photograph is of a pocket watch. We learn from the accompanying article that the watch belonged to Percy Rogers and that the watch stopped at exactly 2:30 after “ticking off 30 of the most terrible minutes in history.” Mr. Rogers was in a stateroom when the torpedo struck the Lusitania. He spent his last minutes on board helping women and children climb into lifeboats. Then he climbed into a lifeboat as well. And then the ship sank. The last paragraph of the article is memorable. It quotes “the official German statement” following the sinking of the Lusitania: “Every German heart is filled with joy, pride and gratification.”
     
    

     

    Now look at the photograph of the ship one more time.
     
    

  • The image remains the same, but clearly we look at it in a different way.

     

    Is that really a photograph of the Lusitania? When was it taken? Could it have been taken on May 7, 1915? If it was, what was the exact time that it was taken? Two o’clock? Two fifteen? Just seconds before the German torpedo hit? Ah, can we see the torpedo in the water? Is that the mother and her child (depicted in the poster) standing on the deck looking out over the water? Is that Percy Rogers with his pocket watch, helping that same woman and child climb into a lifeboat?

     

    The idea that photographs hand us an objective piece of reality, that they by themselves provide us with the truth, is an idea that has been with us since the beginnings of photography. But photographs are neither true nor false in and of themselves. They are only true or false with respect to statements that we make about them or the questions that we might ask of them.

     

    The photograph doesn’t give me answers. A lot of additional investigation could provide those answers, but who has time for that?

     

    Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but there are two words that you can never apply to them: “true” and “false.”

  • • ohn Tagg, _The Burden of Representation_ (1988) has addressed the contingent “truth” in photography, and J Hillis Miller _Illustration_ (1992) the relationship between the image and caption/text. Miller quotes Mark Twain’s (p. 62)comments on the reaction of viewers to the tragic “Beatrice Cenci the Day of Before Her Execution” portrait: “It shows what a label can do. If they did not know the picture, they would inspect it unmoved, and say “Young Girl with Hay Fever”; “Young Girl with her Head in a Bag.” 

       

      — Posted by Joseph R. Allen

       
       
       
    •  
      14.
       
        July 18th,
        2007
        8:22 am 
         
         

      The 4th (rear) smoke stack on the Titanic was a fake and therefore one would easily know that this was not the Titanic. The Titanic would have no smoke coming from the 4th stack. 

       

      — Posted by Ken

       
       
       
    •  
      15.
       
        July 18th,
        2007
        8:27 am 
         
         

      I enjoy the article. I suggest reading Rolan Barthes’ Camera Lucida for more insight into how photographs are influenced and informed by context.

  • Say we were prisoners in a room, with only the captionless photograph of that ship to look at. One might spend time attaching all sorts of associations to the image of the ship, based on even the smallest knowledge of ships like that. We could create a set of fictions and even truths based on experience as well. But again, it would be an infinite list and in the same way we’d be no closer to obaining the truth.

     

    The photograph does tells us that something happened, so it “represents” a truth. It’s as much of as truth as anything you can point to in this world. Whether or not it engages you or is interesting to you, without a caption, is the question I would ask.

     

    We see so many photographs and images on a daily basis. They cease to interest us unless we are forced to spend time with them, as in the case of the prisoner. However, each one is a “representation” of the truth.
  • Edward Steichen famously said (approximately} “a picture may be worth a thousand words, but it may need ten words to give it meaning.” When I started out as a photograher someone said to me, “pictures don’t lie” referring to headshots of actors. My reply, then and now, is that pictures only lie. A 60th of a second at f/5.6 can’t possibly tell the truth about anything in the moving stream of life.
  • While the Lusitania makes a particularly poignant example, didn’t Roland Barthes already say a great deal of this in Camera Lucida?
  • In “On Photography” in 1977, Susan Sontag wrote: “The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: ‘There is the surface. Now — think — or rather feel, intuit — what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.’ Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.” Of course photos don’t provide answers or absolute truths–they are much more interesting and provocative than that!

  • Great meditation, and, to add some “further reading” references, here’s where I would go in order of dificulty:
     Susan Sontag “On Photography”
     Roland Barthes, “Image, Music, Text”
     J. F. Lyotard: Image/Figure

     

    This last title is, I believe, only available in French, but is the loadstone of meditation on the relationship of the caption (text) to the image photograph. Lyotard traces this problematic back through modern art (Klee and others) to Freud’s writings on the dream work. Very rewarding, but very demanding.
  • Some 30 years ago or so, the magazine Scientific American published an article showing an ancient mosaic image recovered from an archeological dig. As I reall, it depicted a dog, and asked the reader to discern its meaning. The text suggested several, such as “Dog for sale”. Only after revealing the words “Cave canem” under the picture, could one realize it was a warning to beware of the dog.
  • One of my favorite examples of this sort of thing is Andre Kertecz’s photo “Greenwich Village - 1953″ which shows a snowy street and parked cars. The most prominent car, however, has dual headlamps — a feature which first appreared in 1957. If we can’t belive the year, how confident can we be of the locale?

  • Mr Morris may recall a law case regarding the use of a photo of bare-breasted women in an inappropriate context. The defense showed the jury a photo of a closeup of a human nipple, and asked the jury whether it was obscene. He next showed them a series of photos of the same nipple, each taken slightly farther away. Finally, of course, we see that the nipple belonged to a well-muscled male.

     

    I’m wondering whether Mr Morris’ remarks would apply to a painting of the Lusitania.

  • As Bob Hariman and I note in No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, Liberal Democracy (Chicago, 2007), we often assume that “no captions are needed” for photographs, but many are always given.

     

    John Lucaites
     www.captionneeded.com
  • A picture can be “false” without a caption. For example, one could use image-editing software to add a fleet of flying saucers hovering over the Lusitania. The resulting picture would be inherently false, because it presents a scene that never existed (as far as we know). A caption could be used to make such an image “true,” by explaining what had been done.

  • I’m a professional video editor, so I have to make such considerations on a day to day basis. What does an image mean? Does it mean anything? How does that meaning change if it is placed before, or after, another image? Why do we care?

     

    This points to an insidious element of television news. We tend to believe we are watching “truth” unfold and making our own judgments. Instead, we are watching a specific set of selected images, arranged in a specific manner, to create a specific effect.

     

    On the lighter side, this is why other people’s home movies and baby photos are boring - we do not share their very personal context.

     

    There is certainly a “language” to visual communication, that is not as direct as we perceive it to be, and may be skillfully manipulated.

  • The problem is not the photo or the photographer, but the mind of the viewer. People tend to see what they think they should see or want to see, which means that even a group of people in the same place at the same time and watching the same event, will arrive with different perceptions and memories.

     

    As John Lennon and Paul McCartney say, “Nothing is real.”

  • As a regular Flickr uploader, I am always conscious of the need to add a neat title and somewhat wordy caption. I want to do that for my own benefit.

     

    Yes I have some photos, albeit too few, taken by my father before WW II. One short caption, written by my mother, set me off to learn much more about the 2 & half years that we lived in Vernet-les-bains. I learned where it was, that it was close to concentration camps set up by the French gov’t to hold Republican soldiers escaping from Franco’s Spain onto French soil over the Pyrenees and lots more about Perpignan, which is some 70 kms east of Vernet.

     

    Yes pictures without captions from my birth family’s past and other families’ past intrigue and sometimes tilt my mind into fantasies about the past. Mine was colorful and I have long ago accepted the dictum that Truth or real life is often stranger and more colourful than fiction.

     

    I really enjoy doing captions that reflect thought and research about the image.
  • he conclusion about photos and their truth or falsity can hardly be repeated enough. Interestingly, Mr. Morris ignores his own conclusion once in the article: “But one thing is clear. When I look at these pictures…I imagine that someone stood on a dry dock, or some vantage point, looked through the viewfinder of the camera, and took a photograph of something that was floating out there in the water.”
      In this day of digital manipulation, even these simple assumptions can never be made about a photo. The ship could be a tiny model in a bathtub, for all we know.
  • To the bibliographical references already mentioned (Barthes, Lyotard, Sontag, Tagg, etc.) I would add Edith Wyschogrod’s book, “An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the Nameless Others” (U. of Chicago Press, 1999).
  • Interesting. I’ve been reading blogs for sometime now, and have been struck by the observaton that this is very little, if any, objectivity in the preception…not only of the topic, but also of the other commentators. Present company included. Objective interpretation of an image, as with an essay, is impossible, given our multiple experiences, and prejudices. ie “Objectively”, This is a ship, with 4 stacks, in the picture, aimed from left to right, obviously on the water, and presumably the ocean. All the rest is trust of the caption, and our own preconception.

  • Re Steve P, Jay Orchard, Mark, especially Mike Cantor, and everyone else who asserts that pictures without context can be true/false

     

    One thing that each of you is missing is that a picture need not a caption to have context. It is the context (and the reliability of the source providing the context), not necessarily a caption (which can be the context itself) that makes a picture true or false…though, I am hesitant to apply those terms to anything, even something with a good deal of reliable context. Take for instance, Mike Cantor’s example of recording technology being used as veridical information…the reason that such information can be used as evidence is BECAUSE of the context surrounding such footage. What is presented with, say, security footage of a robbery? Time, date, location of camera, who has had access to the footage…etc. Without this context, the footage would be meaningless (it could be staged, taken on a different day from the crime committed, etc).

     

    Mark, in your example of using more contemporary photographs, you are forgetting the fact that the reason people (and not everyone, depending on the photo) can “answer true or false” about “pictures from the 2008 presidential race or the war in Iraq” is because of the our current knowledge about such topics. This knowledge functions as the context in which the images are viewed. Without it, the photograph is again relegated to simply a photograph that in and of itself can neither be true nor false. And do you really think that everyone can say whether a photograph from Iraq is depicting something that truly happened? If not, then what makes some people able to say yes or no? More knowledge about the topic, the event, the location, etc.? All of this is context, without which the photograph is simply that, a photograph that is neither true nor false.

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