It must say something without saying that getting to the end of one book a year is blog worthy. Let it be said unsaid, but there is my bookmark in the index pages at the end of Errol Morris’s Believing is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography).
The path here was one of those winding rabbit hole paths that could never have been forecasted. Earlier in the year I came to this book simply from a curiosity about randomly presented public domain images.
Just a random wander into the Public Domain Review site led me to Of Chickens, Eggs, and Cannonballs: Roger Fenton’s Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855) that draws its material from the series by Errol Morris which led me to ordering a copy of the book.
The six chapters are framed around each something as simple as a single photograph yet what it means when we ask about what should be simple yet complex question of asking the photo itself represents truth. Or is that all of the context that exists outside the frame (and time) of the photo? What I find most interesting is where the investigations lead Morris and how often, the most unexpected serendipity opens and amazing path, that in the end, perhaps leaves us with more questions than we expected.
The initial story, the one that lead me here, centers on two photos of a desolate Crimean Valley in 1855, and whether the cannonballs were moved off the road or on to the road in the two photos taken the same day. Historians have used it to suggest photographer Fenton moved them onto the road to make for a more dramatic image of war. Faking photos in 2021 is something we do on the comfort of our devices, but in 1855 there was some physical labor involved. That is, if you follow that the photos were faked.
It all depends which photo you surmise was taken first. We have no evidence that can concretely pinpoint the time and date, no photo metadata.
I took the two public domain images in one of those image comparison thingies, still, just looking at the 2 photos, even at the pixel level, does not yield anything close to absolute truth. And do not believe the “before/after” labels. That’s just what the software assumes!
The unraveling seemed to happen from of all things, a specialist tracking the movement of rocks between the two images. The rocks got to be nicknamed Fred, George, Oswald, Marmaduke, and Lionel, the shasing of light and shadow.
As with each chapter, all this sleuthing gets father to a sense of understanding, but never really the concrete answer. But for me, it is Morris’s pursuit of the answer that is compelling. And this grappling with what truth we can say is purely in a photograph:
It is an error engendered by photography and perpetrated by us. And it comes from a desire for the “ocular truth,” a proof that turns out to be no proof at all. What we see is not independent of our beliefs. Photographs provide evidence, but no shortcut to reality.
Errol Morris, Believing is Seeing, p93.
Hence the puntastic play on Seeing vs Believing as the title of the book… Morris turns the cliché inside out.
And along the way the rabbit holes Morris tracks end up showing us that there is a whole scientific field of the science of smiles, that there are observable differences in muscles above the eye that can differentiate a genuine smile of pleasure over the faked “social smile”. It’s all in the zygomaticus major.
Yet even with this, and the other details Morris writes of, do we know the intent truly of Sabrina Harmon, the smiling (or fake smiling) army staff photographed with the dead tortured victims of Abu Ghraib. Do we get the true truth from the photos?
By the way, if you are seeking a more critical review of the book, see Sarah M. Miller’s one in Études Photographiques. I had not caught her observations that all the chapters in the book surrounded events in war settings. She also suggests he sometime let the interview subjects lead much of the analysis rather than advancing the author’s own argument.
Shrug.
I found all of the chapters compelling to read, as you never knew at all where they would lead to from the opening photo. Maybe most compelling after the cannonballs one was the last chapter, Whose Father Was He (a bit of a red herring as it never has to do with a mistake of kin). Perhaps it was compelling because I just read it! But the story of an unidentified soldier found at the Civil War battle in Gettysburg clutching the photo (an “ambrotype“) of his 3 children was less about the truth of the photo, and more how it played out to understand the truth and story of one man among thousands who died there. It was a story left in family tales, a box of letters left in a box almost forever, and almost chance encounters/connections that seem almost improbable at times.
Even with being able to map his last months tied to messages in letters, Morris asks what we really know of the experience of the person?
And even if we could chart it completely, does it bring us closer to Amos Humiston? Does it capture the essence of the man? Even if we knew where he was every minute of his waking life, would that tell us who he is?
:
There is an endless fascination with last words, but what about last images? There is the legend of a last image being permanently imprinted on the retina of those about to die. Here, the ambrotype reveals that image. By looking at the faces of the Humiston children, we can see what Humiston was seeing as he died.
And what about us? Does linking his experiences with ours allow us to better know him and imagine ourselves as him? Is he important as an individual or an unknown everyman?”
Errol Morris, Believing is Seeing, p238.
And the original image itself found in the hands of Amos Humiston, the ambrotype, has vanished. That it exists out there, and the use/misuses of copies of the image led to many other stories, grows in fascination.
But hey, I got to the end of a book I started in January. Maybe I will get two in this year.
Image Credit: My purchased copy of Believing is Seeing sitting on a wood deck in Maple Creek, SK, the bookmark is as deep int the book as you can leave it. Once this is uploaded to flickr it shall bear the Creative Commons CC0 license most of my photos travel with.
