Response to Errol Morris' views on Photography

“Errol Morris on Photography”

         Some people believe that there are “true” and “false” photographs. Director Errol Morris says otherwise. According to him, each photograph is posed; nothing is out of place and nothing is left out. He also relies on the ideas of Sontag and Barthe by saying that a photograph records a particular event.

         What I believed to be a unique point that he made is that no one really knows the true circumstances behind a photograph. The best that anyone can do is try to piece the components of a photo together to discover its meaning. People generally aren't concerned with where the photo was taken, on what day or time, and so on. He gives the example of a woman smiling next to a corpse. Many had assumed that she was the one involved in the crime, and these people questioned no further. In reality, it was a forensic photograph documenting the crime rather than acting as a picture of the crime itself. He ends the video with a rhetorical question. “Aren't you curious about what you're looking at, just a tiny bit?”

         This is an interesting topic because for our collages, each student shoots their photos under different circumstances, but we might not be so concerned with what time of day the photos were taken, at what range, from what angle, the reasoning behind this location choice, etc. During class critique, the students tend to be very thoughtful with their questions and it sheds a lot of light on the choices that the particular photographer made.