civilized ku # 62 ~ fiction?

Neighborhood bar - Pittsburgh, PA • click to embiggenThe literary critic and academic Frank Kermode has stated that "... fiction calls for conditional assent and fiction, if successful, makes sense of the here and now." - a notion with which I wholeheartedly concur.

Many photographers use the medium's 'reality effect' to great advantage when creating 'picture fictions'. Jeff Wall is an obvious example as is Aaron Hobson and his Cinemascapes. The 'staged' events come across as 'real'. In some cases they may seem improbable and even though we know that the pictures may have taken months of planning, there is no denying their apparent veracity. They have the look and feel of a HCB 'decisive moment'.

For me, part of the appeal of these 'fictions' is the fact that they use with the medium's reality effect to play with the idea of photographic truth. The obvious message is simply that you can't 'believe' everything you see, picture-wise. But a more subtle 'message' for me is that the pictured staged event is a true representation of that event. My brain bounces back and forth between what I know to be 'true' - it's a staged event - and the apparent, implied, conveyed or imagined 'truth' of the picture which, of course, is a fiction. When all is said and done, inevitably, I give myself over to the imagined truth and it is that 'reality' that I carry away with me.

I will go to my grave believing that photographs can be 'true'. One last example of that and I'll drop the subject - many who viewed my pictures of Maggie in the ICU found them to be disturbing and very upsetting. Some, knowing that they were online, refused to view them.

Now, even though many would claim that they are 'subjective' and 'not truth', most viewed them as exceedingly 'real' both literally and in what they conveyed or implied beyond the merely visual. The pictures were not particularly gory but their connoted meaning was too true for many to handle - the truth about human frailty, the truth about the fear of serious illness and disease, the truth about the specter of death, the truth about the loss of loved ones.

I didn't photograph any of those things. I pictured Maggie in the ICU. Even if one considers the pictures to incomplete or inadequate representations the real world, the 'reality effect' of the medium was able to convey 'truths' about the human condition - some truths so real to those who did view the pictures that they cried or turned away.

PS In an interesting aside, Maggie, who has no memory of the ICU - she was in a coma - was very fascinated by the pictures. They made the event 'real' for her. She now uses one the pictures for her MySpace page and she has taken to calling herself 'coma-girl'.