Thanks to dig the cat and Greg Brown for alerting me to this three-part essay on Fenton’s photograph. Now that I’ve read it, I recall seeing this saga before, but I never put in the effort to read it.
As it turns out, there are two versions of the Valley of the Shadow of Death photo: they are near identical, except for the presence of cannonballs on the road in one and the lack of them in the other. There’s been lots of debate about whether one of the photos was posed, and which one came first. Errol Morris sets out to answer the question once and for all, and, having visited the site of the photograph and analyzed the picture, finally concludes, with some help, that the photo with the cannonballs off the road was taken before the picture with balls on the road. Which is interesting, but the essay is also a meditation on war and on the nature of photography, which makes the time and effort spent reading it worth it.
I want to sort of dispute the premise for this whole puzzle. Everyone wants to know whether Fenton altered the scene by deliberately placing cannonballs on the road to make the picture more dramatic, either to more clearly demonstrate the scene, to recreate something he had seen earlier (he had been to the site before, without a camera) or to project a false image of himself as a courageous reporter who puts himself under fire to get a shot. The implicit assumption is that the ON picture, the one with the cannonballs on the road, is the more dramatic and more interesting of the two. I disagree. This is due to the slightly disturbing (to me) psychological effect the picture had on me: when I first saw it, I didn’t realize quite what I was looking at. When I understood, the effect was all the more unsettling for the time it took to sink in. This subtlety is underscored in the OFF picture, where the cannonballs do not contrast as clearly with the rest of the landscape; as a result, our realization of what we’re looking at is slower, and the impact, at least on me, seems to be more severe. For this reason, I contend that whether the ON picture was faked or not, the OFF picture, the first picture, the one no one suspects to be a fake, is actually the stronger picture, and so, whatever the veracity of the second picture, the purely documentary picture, the truthful one, is also the most visually interesting.
This is not always the case, of course. Sometimes reality conspires to create a sight that, for one reason or another, affects us stronger than anything that could possibly be staged. More often, I suspect, the photographer has within his power the ability to create something that more strongly affects the viewer, should the photographer so choose, by altering reality, by intervening in the picture, by changing something that would not have changed simply by the introduction of the camera. These days, with manipulation so easy and pervasive, it’s a matter of honesty to prevent altered representations of reality, or to present them as such. Fiction in photography is ok, just like fiction in literature, but photojournalism would do well to follow the conventions of written journalism: when something is presented as documentary, using the tropes of that genre, it’s dishonest to alter reality in ways it wasn’t already altered simply by the introduction of the observer. (Important point: as a matter of physics, introducing another force, the journalist, into a physical system necessarily alters the system, making it different from what it would look like if we could somehow observe it without affecting it. And so no piece of documentation shows a truly, one hundred percent unaltered reality.)
Sep 9, 2010