Visual Means

What was thinking when they published this guy’s (who has made some interesting films and even has mind mapping on his site) inane, dualistic argument about the veracity of a photograph?!?!

The most interesting thing he says is at the very end – “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.”

Then he has to go and ruin what little redemption he had garnered with this statement by asking: “The photograph doesn’t give me answers. A lot of additional investigation could provide those answers, but who has time for that?”

It’s exactly this kind of attitude that has landed us in the current apathetic quagmire. Our understanding of the world around us requires stories to be told. Photography is but one way to do the telling. It is too easy to reply upon notions of objective storytelling – one reason why people have been doing it for so long and continue to do so today. The veracity of photographs is determined not via the dualism of truth/falsity, but is instead predicated on a confluence of considerations from the circumstances of the image’s making to the subsequent readings of the image in different contexts. Such determinations are something that we, as readers/viewers need to work for – by being educated about the means by which such stories are told and and understanding of who is telling us the stories.

The photograph does provide answers, Errol. It’s the way you’re considering your questions that needs some more philosophizing…

Thanks to Bobby for directing my attention…