urban ku # 135 ~ fiction and truth
Thursday, November 15, 2007 at 05:32PM 
History, fiction or both? • click to embiggenStephen Connor wrote; "... Jeff Wall's photographs are "true" in the sense that, yep, he accurately (very) photographed something in the real world. He photographed actual events. But, he truthfully photographed a staged event. The models were really there, really doing what Wall shows them doing, but what they were really doing was acting. So, where does the "truth" lie (so to speak) in these photos? Real photos of real actors really pretending to do something that they really weren't. Except that they were. But not really."
Which brings to mind the fact that fiction can more real than truth. It is the truth of a well-told story. It is true not to life but to a shared experience in imagination. 'Truth' that is imaginative without being imaginary.
Photographers are hard on themselves when it comes to 'truth'. We allow authors, film makers, poets, sculptors and other artists to create 'fictions' in which we can find any number of 'truths' - Tolstoy's War and Peace, Dylan's Masters of War, Picasso's Guernica are ripe with imaginative truths. But, show us an accurate photograph of an actual event, place, or person, one that also tells us a 'story' about that event, place, or person and we start to yammer on about how it isn't 'true'. About how, in fact, it can't be true because, as we all know, a photograph of a thing is not the thing itself.
Maybe it's that the Doubting Thomas' amongst us are too aware of the deceits of the medium to suspend their disbelief in order to enter the realm of belief.
Fiction is history that didn't happen and history is fiction that did. ~ George Orwell
Reader Comments (2)
Authors of fiction, poetry and plays are just following the patterns laid down long ago in oral story-telling. Same goes for movies - they're just filmed plays. Sculptors and painters have no choice but to "fictionalize" to a certain extent - it simply takes too long to create a representation, in their chosen media, of anything in the "real" world. Photographs, however, are made in a fraction of a second. Photography is, therefore, the perfect medium for recording reality. That's what's wrong with Jeff Wall's photographs. Hours (days) are spent making up a fake moment in time. They're essentially storyboards for movies he seems disinclined, or unable, to make.
The suggestion that a photograph of war, or a parade, or poverty, or a shopping mall might be "untrue" is, I think, more an acknowledgment of the ways true photographs have been used to tell false stories. The example that leaps to mind is the photograph(s) of George Bush in his leather flight jacket declaring "Mission accomplished". The photo was true. The story wasn't.
"Photographs, however, are made in a fraction of a second."
The hell you say.
http://www.neutralhillsstills.ca/index.php?showimage=345