Photos have this way of deceiving us because we don’t know what’s really going on in the moment the photograph is captured; we only see a small frame shot in the context that the photographer wants us to see. It is, in a sense, a censored image of a certain moment, a censored image of the world. Each lens is unique to each specific photographer, and for that, each photo tells a different story. Morris challenges us to look at our relationship between photographs and trust. Why do we trust photographs?
It’s obvious in our society that the power of visual imagery is immense. We expect that the photos taken for newspapers and other highly-respected new sources to be objective and honest and true. There’s a real disconnect going on, to have a tampered photo accompany a front page news story. We expect, as readers, to be handed the objective truth (although, let’s be real, that doesn’t always happen), and when we are presented with this phony image, we begin to question the whole validity of the article, and of the newspapar itself. If the photo is fake, why wouldn’t the story be, too? Or atleast be inaccurate and include false facts and other misteps, such as the photo implicated. As they say, “A photo is worth a thousand words” and in this case, I’m not sure exactly what those thousand words are.
But I know what Errol Morris would say: “I guess the moral of the story is we should always consider the possibility that we may be comparing something fake with something else that is fake.” He explains that “doctored photos are the least of our worries”. After all, if you want to trick someone “all you need to do is change the caption.” For example, the photographs presented by Colin Powell that were used to justify the war are very low in quality, and it’s hard to see anything clearly; it’s the captions and labels that the added in to the photo that turns the original photograph into something more powerful.
Errol Morris says, If it’s fake, fine, but what is it that we are supposed to infer from the photograph? The L.A. Times credit the photograph to the Revolutionary Guard, Errol Morris explains that this attribution tells us we’re looking at a genuine Iranian photograph- the photo really came from Iran- not that the photograph itself is genuine. I thought this was an interesting point, and something that I had not considered. And the point that even after exposing the fraud of the photo, the missiles are still real. We are still left with real missiles, whether it was three or for. They’re real. So I guess what we’re to infer from the photograph isn’t that the missiles are real or fake or whatever, it’s to understand that the power of visual imagery is immense. It’s to understand that one photo, whether photo-shoppped or not, has such control and power over us.
As I was reading the comments of Errol Morris’ blog post, I stumbled across one that really got me thinking. Someone commented: “As a historian I take interest in what’s not true, because sometimes it tells us something important about how we feel.” Wow, this really struck a chord with me. It got me thinking about the person that doctored the missile photo, and how they must have implanted the fourth missile into the photo, altering the reality of the original, because they wanted to convey a certain message. The fact that whoever photo-shopped the photo has absolute control over what our eyes, and in turn, what our minds tell us, is an extremely powerful notion. They have the power to control, convince, and deceive, and we’ll absorb, and most likely believe whatever the photo’s saying/trying to convey because that’s the way our brains work. We absorb and accept and believe in images that come from accredited (and not-so-accredited) sources. We are visual animals. We thrive off of imagery. Plain and simple. So the problem, then, with this whole fourth missile controversy, may not after all, be whether the fourth missile launched, or was ever really there, or if the photo was altered—the problem is that we’ve been manipulated by the photograph. Photographs can deceive. And the power in all of this, is that photographs have the ability not only to copy, but to alter reality. And in turn, this alters our perceptions of the world.
Alfredo Jaar explores the “public’s desensitization to images and the limitations of art” in a profound way. Every work is a “response to a real-life event, a real-life situation” that has impacted him or moved him personally in some way. In “The Rwanda Project” his main strategy is to reduce the meaning of “one million dead” to focus in on one individual, giving the person a name, that way the public, who was is desensitized with such a large numbers, numbers almost unfathomable or incomprehensible for our brains, now holds a greater impact and really resonates with us because we are hearing and seeing the story of one single person that has been affected. And we’re all just a single person. We know firsthand what it means and how it feels to be one person. So the fact that the one individual could be us, it wakes us up. The weight that “one million” holds is overwhelming and unrelatable. But one, one person, we are one person, so it’s relatable. Jaar mentions that balance between the content and the visual is important, and something that he strives for. If there’s too much visual, too much image, and not enough content, the image becomes just another image. But having a story, or a message, or some kind of content to back the image has such effectiveness and is so powerful because through the visual image there’s a real story. And that makes it memorable. Jaar’s communication through photographs is a process of visual and personal curiosity. All of Jaar’s pieces are emotionally charged because both the aesthetics and the ethics of the photo are clear. They really have to do with how the audience will view it- what projections they’ll make about it, what assumptions they’ll make, what connections they’ll make, and in what social or historical context they’ll put it in.
We see the importance of the audience’s projections when Jaar speaks of the piece “The Rwanda Project” in regards to Chile. He says that the shape/form of the heaped photographs, visually representative of the one million dead in Rwanda, takes on a different visual interpretation depending on where and when it’s viewed. In Chile, Jaar says the shape “would immediately suggest the Andes”, which will then directly connect the people viewing it with whatever situation is going on there. I thought this was an intriguing point; as much as the artist holds the power in terms of form and aesthetics in the creation of a piece or installation, the audience holds just as significant power in the interpretation and connection with the piece. The artist can’t make the audience connect with the piece; they can sure as hell give it their best effort, but when all is said and done, it’s the audience that projects their own feelings, thoughts, and ideologies onto the piece. Therefore, it’s the artists job to visually construct a piece that’s communicative and compelling enough for the artist to make the connections that the artist, in this case Jaar, is striving for. The communication between the artist and the audience is imperative to the success, not only of the piece, but of the bigger picture in the genocide in Rwanda. And if we view any of the pieces in “The Rwanda Project” and aren’t patient enough to attempt to communicate or understand it, well, that’s our fault.
In “The Gramsci Trilogy”, an homage to Italian thinkers Gramsci and Pasolini, we encounter the “Infinite Cell.” I found this concept to be the most powerful. As Jaar says: “What I’m expecting from the audience is that they feel their bodies compromised by the space. I think this is a key element of all my installations. I think that the body has a language, and when the audience enters this place their body language will change. I’m interested in these shifts. It’s the capacity of architecture and art to produce those changes. They are merely physical changes, but of course the metaphor here is that this also suggests the possibility of an intellectual change, a mental shift.” I think this is brilliant. Jaar uses architecture and art as compliments to each other, constructing a physical space in which the audience is forced to change not only their physical “language”, that is, their physical presence, but the audience is also forced to change their mental and intellectual thinking. The fact that the space is aesthetically and architecturally constructed in such a way that brings about a shift in the thinking of the audience is remarkable. That the audience inside of the jail cell actually feels what it must have been like, that they feel trapped, small, all those things that someone in prison must feel, and that because they are physically/outwardly feeling this way their internal/mental feelings start to shift- man, that’s incredibly powerful. It speaks to the tremendous talent Jaar has-as both an architect and and artist-to create a space that allows both a physical shift in body language and a mental shift in intellectual language. It’s interesting that Jaar mentions that “ideas never die” in one of the interviews, because I think this sentiment directly connects with his “The Gramsci Triology” piece; here he takes all these ideas and ideologies of past thinkers, and uses them, fusing his own ideas with the ideas of Pasolini and Gramsci to create something meaningful and significant to the present day.
Jaar’s background in architecture helps shape his construction and communication of his pieces. His use of light as an illuminating factor in the Rwanda piece, revealing the truth and horror, is really interesting. As he mentions, light is traditionally a sign of hope and faith, but here Jaar uses it to literally “shed light” on the horrific conditions in Rwanda. It’s a very powerful thing. We see what we don’t want to see, what we are desensitized to, and when this happens it’s uncomfortable.
Craig Hickman showed some of the work of Caleb Charland, who uses his scientific curiosity to artistically investigate the world around him. Upon further inspection of his website, I found these really cool “BioGraphs”, which are essentially just photos of bacteria growing on film. In these ; .What started out as a photograph transformed into something more: a ‘biograph’ of life, telling a story of a living thing, a trace of life, “an index of existence.” Charland explains that in this BioGraph series he refined the experiments time and time again, as we also see in Jaar’s work. It’s this constant state of curiously wanting more, more knowledge of how life works, of how life functions in relation to visual imagery, and how we as a human audience take it all in, how we connect with and react to these images. These images, in Charland’s biographs, are little slices of life, a glimpse into the world of an organism, much like Jaar’s pieces are a “life-scapes” on film, or in an installation.
I think these biographs accurately pertain to all the artists we’ve discussed this week at some level; there’s a curosity about the work of Charland, and how things work and processes function, like we’ve seen in both Jaar’s work (his view of the creative and architectural process and his curiosity of humankind) and also in Errol Morris’ article (his curiosity and constant questioning of visual images and what’s really going on behind the photo). The photos start out as a simple photograph, and yet through processing and audience participation, they turn into something more- photographs that tell the story of a life. They seek this truth through curiosity of life, of what’s happening around them (be it historically, politically, or biologically), and subsequently test the power of visual imagery through this constant state of processing their own worlds.
They all use the world around them, whether it’s the investigation of a forged photo (Morris), a political thing (Jaar), or a biological thing (Charland’s BioGraphs), taking these real-life events or situations and turning them into power visual imagery that connects the audience. The power of visual imagery just keeps going and going. And it’s our responsibility as observers of our reality and participants of the world to keep asking questions. Don’t settle for someone else's version of reality. Instead, seek your own, such as Alfredo Jaar, Errol Caleb Charland have done.
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