Greg A. Brown

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. (more…)