Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography

by Errol Morris

Hardcover, 2011

Genres

Art & Design

Status

Available

Call number

770.9

Collection

Your library

Publication

Penguin Press (2011), Edition: 1st Edition, 336 pages

Description

"Academy Award-wining filmmaker Errol Morris investigates the hidden truths behind a series of documentary photographs. In Believing Is Seeing Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris turns his eye to the nature of truth in photography. In his inimitable style, Morris untangles the mysteries behind an eclectic range of documentary photographs, from the ambrotype of three children found clasped in the hands of an unknown soldier at Gettysburg to the indelible portraits of the WPA photography project. Each essay in the book presents the reader with a conundrum and investigates the relationship between photographs and the real world they supposedly record. During the Crimean War, Roger Fenton took two nearly identical photographs of the Valley of the Shadow of Death-one of a road covered with cannonballs, the other of the same road without cannonballs. Susan Sontag later claimed that Fenton posed the first photograph, prompting Morris to return to Crimea to investigate. Can we recover the truth behind Fenton's intentions in a photograph taken 150 years ago? In the midst of the Great Depression and one of the worst droughts on record, FDR's Farm Service Administration sent several photographers, including Arthur Rothstein, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans, to document rural poverty. When Rothstein was discovered to have moved the cow skull in his now-iconic photograph, fiscal conservatives-furious over taxpayer money funding an artistic project-claimed the photographs were liberal propaganda. What is the difference between journalistic evidence, fine art, and staged propaganda? During the Israeli-Lebanese war in 2006, no fewer than four different photojournalists took photographs in Beirut of toys lying in the rubble of bombings, provoking accusations of posing and anti-Israeli bias at the news organizations. Why were there so many similar photographs? And were the accusers objecting to the photos themselves or to the conclusions readers drew from them? With his keen sense of irony, skepticism, and humor, Morris reveals in these and many other investigations how photographs can obscure as much as they reveal and how what we see is often determined by our beliefs. Part detective story, part philosophical meditation, Believing Is Seeing is a highly original exploration of photography and perception from one of America's most provocative observers"--Provided by publisher.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member rivkat

Morris makes documentaries, and this is definitely a book written by a documentarian, which is not entirely a criticism. There are a lot of transcripts of long exchanges between him and people he calls up to talk to about various photos (which is actually not how he does his documentaries, where

you almost never hear his side of the interview). The most interesting chapters of the book are about Abu Ghraib photos—what does it mean to misidentify the famous hooded man, as the NYT did? Given that the man they misidentified was also imprisoned, was also tortured, why focus on whether the picture was of him? What about the photos of US military personnel smiling and giving thumbs-up signs in front of humiliated prisoners? When we see a social smile, we think it indicates pleasure even when it instead represents discomfort with nowhere to go. Morris has a lot of important stuff to say about framing, reality, and how we shape the meaning of images; he also has a lot of stuff to say about how he figured out which of two pictures of a battlefield was taken first, where a less obsessive person would have given you the answer and the reasoning without telling you all about all the unsuccessful attempts to figure it out in other ways.

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LibraryThing member Harlan879

A fascinating and beautifully-produced, if somewhat under-edited, set of essays about photography and what we can know about a situation from those photographs. Errol Morris is an amazingly thoughtful person, with a great eye for both the importance of visual media and the stories that people tell.

LibraryThing member cerfercat

A fascinating analysis of photography - what it is, what role it plays in society, the traits people associate with it, beliefs, truths, assumptions - in four acts. Errol Morris selects four photographs, or four scenes that are photographed, and examines the history and controversy of each. The

book reads like a documentary film transcript (not surprising given Morris' occupation) and it is a surprisingly effective technique. The reader feels part of the conversation. This book really made me think; and I love the "excluded elephant" idea that all photographs edit something out/hide something as much as they reveal.

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LibraryThing member MSarki

Pretty inconsequential book about mostly things that do not interest me. I did like the Walker Evans segment, or what had something to do with Walker Evans, but for the most part, a perfect bore.

LibraryThing member wrk1

"How do we know what we know?" illustrated and discussed over and over in a series of essays where the truth of photographs from Abu Ghraib in 2003, Sepastopol in the 1850's, the U.S. in the 1930's, Lebanon in 2007, and from Gettysburg in 1863 is discussed.

The subtitles of the sections:

Intentions

of the photographer
Photographs reveal and conceal
Captioning, propaganda, and fraud
Photography and memory

Errol Morris is a documentary filmmaker, Oscar winner, and MacArthur award winner and a dogged investigator. He's written a thought-provoking and well-illustrated book. Just a tad repetitive.

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LibraryThing member Paulagraph

That photography both reveals and conceals is not a new idea. Or that, as Morris comments, "concepts of naturalness, authenticity, and posing are all slippery slopes that when carefully examined become hopelessly vague." Or that, throughout the history of photography, photographers and others have

grappled with the relationship of the photograph to reality. So, I experienced no "Aha" moments while reading Believing is Seeing . . . . Rather, of most interest to me were the details about the photographed historical moments that Morris centers his discussion around: The Crimean War, The Battle of Gettysburg, Abu Ghraib, the Great Depression & Israeli airstrikes in Tyre Lebanon on August 7, 2006. Of particular interest is the interview by the author with Ben Curtis, the AP photographer who took the what-became-exemplary photo of a Mickey Mouse doll in the ruins of Tyre. Curtis painstakingly explains the photo-journalist's working conditions, methods & ethics. Morris's own obsession with the photographs he fixates on here is so extreme as to feel oppressive. Understandable perhaps in that, as a documentary filmmaker himself, he has to continually question his own methods and motivations in the visual presentation of "facts" and "truth." In his quest to get to the bottom of the ambiguities and controversies surrounding the photos in question, he interacts with quite a few other men (always men, except for one female guide in the Crimea/ Ukraine) with congruent obsessions of their own.

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LibraryThing member Stevil2001

Morris's book is pretty easily explained by the title: we see things because we want to believe them. He explores this concept through a few different case studies: Roger Fenton's "Valley of the Shadow of Death" photographs from the Crimean War, Sabrina Harman's photographs of the Abu Ghraib prison

abuses, Dust Bowl photojournalism from the 1930s, combat zone photography from Palestine, and the case of Amos Humiston's Civil War photographs. The book is okay, but it is not 300-pages okay. Morris has some insights, but they are often buried in minutiae; his processes of uncovering the truth behind Fenton, for example, goes through more tedious detail than is needed to arrive at his point that every photograph is posed.

This is, of course, a point John Berger made on (I believe) the third page of Ways of Seeing back in the 1970s. Morris writes like someone who believes himself charting new territory, even though he must know better, as he cites people like Susan Sontag and talks to a lot of experts in photography. (It's these conversation that pad out the book.) The story of Fenton, an injustly-maligned man, is the book's best part, but it didn't need to be seventy pages to make its point. The chapter on Sabrina Harman, on the other hand, is pithy and focused and interesting. This book could have been a couple focused essays (and I think it was at some point? I believe these all started as New York Times columns), but instead they're stretched out in order to yield mostly banal insights. It feels mean to say it, but I suspect the book is best used as a source of anecdotes, rather than something you should actually read yourself. I'll happily tell you the Roger Fenton story in about five minutes myself.

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LibraryThing member steve02476

A close but informal look at photography, journalism, history, propaganda, and truth using a half-dozen or so examples. Very educational and thought-provoking. As the jacket copy says "part detective story, part philosophical meditation."

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