Errol Morris is one of my favorite filmmakers, creating documentaries like The Fog of War that try to get at the truth of a matter through oral interviews with subjects. Morris does a bunch of research behind the scenes, but he rarely appears in his documentaries, even eschewing the usual narration that accompanies documentaries. In its place is deftly-edited responses from the interview subjects, making for films that are unlike anything else out there.
But it isn’t just the methodology that makes Morris’ movies good; there’s also a really incisive way of viewing the world that informs those interviews and the subsequent editing. Every once in a while, Morris will write an essay or something that finally lets him speak directly to the reader, and those occasions are a treat. What luck, then, to get Morris’s new monthly-ish series of essays on the New York Times website. They serve as a sort of preview to his upcoming film Standard Operating Procedure (S.O.P. for short), an investigation into the Abu Ghraib abuses and the iconic phographs that made them known all around the world. As usual, Morris does the big-picture thing better than anyone else, asking what constitutes “truth” in photography and how we can get at it.
The first essay, on the general properties of “truth” in photographs, uses a photograph of the Lusitania to examine whether truth-claims can actually be made about the subjects of photographs through that photograph (as opposed to the chemical composition of the photograph itself). It’s true that claims are made about photography subjects all the time — whether implicitly or explicitly — but it’s at best philosophically dubious to accept any of those claims.
The second essay, published earlier this month, covers territory closer to the Abu Ghraib subject of his film. Ali Shalal Qaissi, a former prisoner at Abu Ghraib nicknamed “Clawman” by his jailers, came forward to claim that he was the hooded man standing on a box with wires trailing from both hands. The only problem is that the documentary evidence and testimony available points to another prisoner being the subject of that photograph, and the New York Times accordingly retracted the story about one week later. Morris talks about the risks of observation, and of photography in particular due to its seeming viscerality:
We see the world in a way that is influenced by our beliefs. If we believe that Clawman is in the photograph, then we see Clawman in the photograph, even though all we are looking at is a hooded man draped in a blanket standing on a box with only his legs and hands visible. The left hand does look disfigured – but the photograph of it has been taken with a low-resolution digital camera that provides limited evidence one way or the other.
So as not to give a leg up to those post-modernist theoreticians who would throw truth out the window along with objectivity, let’s be clear: this is not an assault on truth. There is a real world out there. There is a fact of the matter. Someone was under that hood and that someone was either Clawman, Gilligan or someone else. We can have false beliefs about the identity of the Hooded Man but that does not mean in principle that we cannot discover his true identity. But a question remains: can photography help us in that endeavor? I am skeptical and would go even further and suggest that photographs attract false beliefs – as fly-paper attracts flies. Why my skepticism? Because photography can make us think we know more than we really know.
It is easy to confuse photographs with reality. To many of us, photographs are reality. But however real they may seem, they are not reality. Reality is three-dimensional. Photographs are but two-dimensional, and record only a moment, a short interval of time snatched from the long continuum of before and after. Photographs offer “the ocular proof†demanded by Othello – but judging from Othello’s subsequent behavior, that standard of proof did not serve him well in the end.Â
Errol’s advice would be well-heeded.
Tags: Movies, Photography