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'.

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

A truth • click to embiggenFor those of you who have not, as Paul Maxim opined, "avoided Mark's invitation to express their thoughts on "truth", like it was a visit to the dentist", let me offer the following for your consideration.

Amongst the many definitions of the words 'truth' and 'true' are these; 1. being or reflecting the essential or genuine character of something; 2. conformity with fact or reality; 3. a verified or indisputable fact, proposition, principle, or the like.

In light of these notions, let me ask this question (as one example of a zillion I could ask) - have you never seen a photograph that not only accurately depicts the (pick one) visual ravages, tragedy, insanity, brutality, devastation of war and, by so doing, also conveys clearly and without reservation at least one human 'truth' about such things - something that every rational human being knows to be 'true' about war?

The fact that a 'truth' or something that is 'true' about war is not the whole truth about war does not make that 'truth', untrue or false. There undoubtedly would be more 'truths' about war to be discovered and to know but, once again, I do not see how that negates a truth that any given photograph of war might convey.

A Burtynsky Quarry triptych • click to embiggenWhile we're on the subject of 'truth', I came across this from Pablo Picasso re: the act of putting pigment on canvas; "Something sacred, that's it. It's a word we should be able to use, but people would take it the wrong way. You ought to be able to say a painting is as it is, with its capacity to move us, because it is as though it were touched by God .... that is what's nearest to the truth."

Interesting words and thought from a Communist and a dedicated atheist.

IMO, it seems that the idea that photographs are not 'true' or contain no 'truth' is a fanciful invention of the academic art world - a dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin academic theory. A theory that actually seems designed to strip photography of one of its unique media-specific characteristics - its ability to create not only an 'accurate' description of the real world but also a snapshot of the 'truth' about it as well.

Before I go into this idea further, I would really like to hear some opinions on the subject for you. Please let me know some of your thoughts on the matter. If you don't have any, think about it and get some.

FYI - the price of this Burtynsky triptych is $57,000. 3 days after the shows opening, 2 had been sold (along with about 15 other individual prints - of about the same size as one of those pictured here - at $23,000 per). Ain't no starvin' artist here.

Leaving the American Museum of Natural History • click to embiggenWhile I was reading a review about a photographer's pictures, I came across a sentence that I liked very much wherein the writer stated that to view his pictures in a certain way "... would be to shrug off their (and our) abiding care for what we see in them, and the beauty that seems to emerge from such benign attentiveness as well ..."

Does 'abiding care' and 'benign attentiveness' fit into your picturing?

Wildness close to someone else's home • click to embiggenRichard Avedon wrote, "All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth."

On my long journey home from Pittsburgh, I was actually thinking along these lines about the picture presented here. I made it from the window of friend's loft (where I was staying) while I was in Pittsburgh. It certainly qualifies for Wildness gallery - it's just not wildness close to my home.

In any event, I was thinking about this picture because, in a way, it defiantly stands in direct contrast to the preferred visual image of Pittsburgh as decreed by the Pgh Chamber of Commerce. Those pictures almost always present a dramatic view of the city skyline as seen from the top of Mt. Washington (not actually a mountain, MW is a very steep and high hillside right across the river from downtown Pgh. The pictured view is always dressed in a soft, alpenglow-like light which gives a jewel-like presence to the cities many glass enclosed towers.

It could be said that these pictures, in their own visitors-bureau-porn way, could be said to be 'accurate' - the view does exist and it is, at times, bathed in a soft glowing light. But ...

Once a visitor or resident descend from the lofty geographic and pictorial heights of Mt. Washington, the (by far) most commonly encountered view throughout the city is much more akin to that pictured above. In fact (and in 'truth'), the cityscape is mostly that of a worn-out, run-down, rust-belt urban environment. Somewhat depressing, in fact.

So, both representations are, in fact, 'accurate' but it would be my contention that only one of them is 'truth'.