urban ku # 178 ~ gimme another break (fuzzy logic)
Friday, March 21, 2008 at 10:06AM 
Andrews Street bridge • click to embiggenI am growing very weary, in discussions regarding truth in photographs, of reading / hearing the sweeping and oft-repeated phrase that there can little, if any, truth in photography because "truth is a very relative term and is based on opinion". Sure, I am well aware that the truth and the idea of truth have been used, abused, parsed, sliced, diced, and generally kicked around since forever, but...
... then again, did you ever read the US Declaration of Independence? You know, the one that we base our way of life upon. The one that states, "We hold these truths to be self-evident." The one that states that "all men are created equal". The one that states that "... whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
Now, before someone cries "foul" and opines that there is a great difference between the truth of and the truths contained in the Declaration of Independence and the truth and truths possible in the medium of photography, I mention the D of I just to dispense with the grand sweeping nature of all truth being 'relative' and subjective. Simply put, there are lots of self-evident universally accepted truths that are the bedrock of a sane society.
The mere fact that some disagree with or don't accept these truths does not invalid those truths. Hitler obviously didn't 'believe' the principle truths of the US D of I. He did not accept the idea of basic human worth. He did not believe that all men are created equal. He defied, on a massively destructive scale, virtually all that a sane society holds to be truth, but his actions did not invalidated those truths. The actions and beliefs of an insane person or society do not constitute an alternative and subjective truth.
That said, on to the subject of truth in photography / photographs.
Take, as an extreme example, Jeff Wall's photograph, Dead Troops Talk (a vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986). 
Dead soldiers talking • click to enlargeJust the title alone tells us that the picture must be a 'fabrication' because, as we all know, dead soldiers don't talk and all of Jeff Wall's pictures are staged and carefully orchestrated 'fabrications'.
It's a given that the actual referent in this photograph, the dead soldiers talking, are an 'untruth'. It's a given that the event, as depicted, never happened as anything other than a staged event for the purposes of picturing. In fact, each individual grouping of dead soldiers was pictured separately and assembled digitally, so, again in fact, there wasn't even an actual scene or event as pictured. In short, everything about the referent in this photograph is 'untrue' and not 'real'.
That said, IMO, you'd have to be a fool or mentally dysfunctional not to 'see' a lot of truth and truths in this photograph. And the mere fact that the truth of and many of the truths 'seen' therein will be arrived at subjectively by each individual, does not by any reckoning mean that no universally accepted truth or truths will be self-evident.
The picture speaks of very 'real' horrors and mysteries. It implies a veritable host of others as well. It speaks to many truths - the horrors of war being the most obvious. It does not, and can not, tell us whether those horrors were justifiable in this particular case - that 'truth' is very subjective and based on political opinion.
But, ultimately, please don't tell me, despite the fact that it is an utter 'fabrication', that this photograph is not a true statement about what it means to be human or that a whole host of truths can not be seen/found within its frame.
FYI, the Jeff Wall picture is © Jeff Wall and it is listed by the Marian Goodman Gallery of New York as a Documentary photograph.
Reader Comments (3)
Excuse me, I do believe the term "hold", as in "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." is an opinion, albeit a very strongly held one. Truth is in the eye of the beholder. The acceleration due to gravity in a vacuum at sea level is a "truth", subject to measurement; the only thing that will change with additional "opinions" (measurements) are the error bars
In the Post Modern Photo Art world there is no difference between pictures taken by a war photographer in the field and those created using props and models such as the one by Jeff Wall. I listened in disbelief once when Roy Arden, one of Jeff Wall's more successful students, explain that he protested the Vietnam war by photographing products in Wall Mart and that it had the same impact on the war as did the pictures taken by photographers who actually went to Vietnam to record what they saw happening. To these people the words documentary and propaganda are interchangeable. Documentary photographs are not documents but photographs made to further a point of view. It's interesting that I have been to a number of lectures at the Vancouver Art Gallery (the home gallery of Jeff Wall) in the last few years and there was a subtext which said that photographers don't think they just push buttons. Jeff Wall calls himself an artist and would be insulted if you called him a photographer. I was surprised that A.D. Coleman in a lecture at the VAG two weeks ago said he knew of few photographers who could think. He said this in praise of pictorialism which he is fond of. Pictorialism, of course, is much about changing what the camera saw into a more dramatic or painterly thus artistic image. The problem with all of this is that photography ceases to be appreciated for what it does best, record what we see in front of us. Photography is praised for the unnatural colours we create in photoshop, the distortions we create with wide angle and telephoto lenses or in Jeff Wall’s case, the tableaus we create with props and models. I’ve seen the photo in question and found it, despite its impressive size and technical merit, to be cold and without passion. Its impact on me was similar to those colour advertisements I see every once in while in very old Life magazines from the 1960’s; unconvincing, unreal, staged; advertising at its most banal. I’ll take pictures from the photographers who were actually there every time.
the "self-evident" truths mentioned in the D of I weren't self evident for most people for the most part of US history, just to name two examples: not until the 1920's do women get the right to vote; not until the 1960's there is real equality in education and rights between whites and blacks. And they aren't self-evident for a good chunk of the world nowadays and they haven't been for most of recorded human history in many parts of the world.
Other than that I'm fine with the rest of your post.