Believing is Seeing
Understanding photographs
Understanding Photography
Believing can come before seeing
Believing is seeing: Observations on the mysteries of photography, is another one of the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris’s characteristically oblique examinations of our visually oriented society. It argues for an inversion of a popular conception regarding the accuracy of still images (Blanchard, 1998, p. 514) — that photographs are widely recognized as having a pristine visual integrity, even today. In this age of technological magnificence, and some say malfeasance (Kirn, 2010), the rationale informing this popular belief follows a logic that seems naïve or at least suffers from willful blindness — whatever a mechanical device records, the truth of the subject matter is guaranteed through this act of recording. McLuhan concurs — “photography mirrored the external world automatically, yielding an exactly repeatable visual image” (1964, p. 171).
However, as fans of Morris might expect, this popular conception is not so straightforward. As the title of his book alludes, believing is seeing, an inversion of the prevailing paradigm. Morris asserts that it is the beliefs of a person, and not the seeing of the recorded phenomenon, that is fundamental when interpreting the visual information conveyed by a photograph.
To prove his thesis, Morris chronicles a dizzyingly disparate set of phenomena. He returns to the infancy of photography and hurtles forward in time to its more mature form today. His book includes a discussion of the shocking photographs of fatally tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Still images shot by members of the Information Division of the Farms Security Administration (FSA) that detailed evidence of rural life, poverty and drought. An ambrotype of children recovered from the grasp of an unknown soldier at Gettysburg. The quizzical recurrence of atypical subject matter recorded by different photojournalists in a tumultuous place — children’s toys strewn on the rubble of attacks during the Israeli-Lebanese war in 2006. And identical photographs of the Valley of the Shadow of Death during the Crimean War with one distinct difference — one has cannonballs strewn along a roadway path, the other does not.
As a result, Morris’s investigation results in a set of theses, less declarative in form than interrogative. It consists of questions to ponder, answers perhaps perpetually unsettled:
• What are the hidden truths behind a photograph?
• Can the visual information conveyed by a photograph obscure truth as much as it reveals?
• Is what people see in a photograph objective in nature? Something that can be interpreted by a diversity of viewers that lends itself towards uniform meaning?
• Or is what people see determined largely by their beliefs (e.g. it is more subjective in nature)?
Morris wrestles with a few of the many issues involved in photography, questions that are also characteristic of the field of visual media generally — the focus of this dissertation. To add to this introductory slate of topics to debate, the broader parameters for this literature review are set in the next section. As an overarching theme, it is argued that photography — and other visual media — can be used within the social sciences to help find the truth hidden behind this visual media. But as alluded to by Morris’s work, getting to the truth is complicated. It is clouded by the production of visual media, intention of its creator, subject matter chosen, visually-oriented society where it occurs, consumption by viewers, as well as conflicting/complex aesthetic, moral and epistemological issues that complicate all of the above.
References
Blanchard, M. (Ed.) (1998). History of the mass media in the United States: An encyclopedia. Chicago, IL: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers.
Kirn, W. (2010, October 17). Little Brother is watching. The New York Times Magazine, p. MM17.
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. New York, NY: Signet Books.
Morris, E. (2011). Believing is seeing: Observations on the mysteries of photography. New York, NY: The Penguin Press.