In this lecture, we discussed the use of language in
photography, such as whether we should replace ‘truth’ with ‘evidence’ as
‘truth’ may be misleading, because photography can lie to people. As M.Riboud
explained, “the
idea of photography as evidence is pure bullshit. A photo is no more proof of
any reality than what you may hear being said by someone in a bus. We only
record details, small fragments of the world.” J.H.Lartigue disagrees, stating
“Photography to me is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true.” I
personally agree with M.Riboud as photos are constantly being staged. I
think this is supported by the invasion of Iraq, which was greatly influenced
by the misinterpretation of a photograph, which supposedly showed weapons of
mass destruction.
We
watched a TED talk by Taryn Simon, who investigated people who were wrongly
convicted of crimes due to the misinterpretation of photographs. For example,
in one case a woman looked at a photo of a suspect and rejected him as a
possibility as she said he was too old. So, the police snuck in another picture
of that man, but when he was four years younger, which consequently led to her
positively identifying him as her attacker. The photo had become the memory –
the lines were blurred. In another case, a woman was shown a photo of her
attacker causing her to drop all the chargers as she said the photo had
influenced her memory making her biased.
Errol
Morris spoke about the elephant outside the frame, meaning that we can
exclude/include whatever we want in our image, which manipulates what the scene
actually is. It opens up the debate of whether photographers should observe
from far away and not touch anything. All photography is posed as you choose
what you want to include in the shot. You don’t see the before or after. The
only way we can truly see what we’re looking at is to investigate.
Links to Advertising
Just
as M.Riboud explained, photography is all staged, and to a certain extent, so
is advertising. For the most part, TV adverts and Billboards have to be planned
in extreme detail, however there are exceptions. For example, ambient
advertising is harder to stage as it relies on the reactions and participation
of the audience. Similarly, some TV ads are harder to stage if they don’t
include actors/staged scripts. For example, the Hotel Febreze advert, which
used ‘real’ people who were pulled off the streets, blindfolded, then asked to describe
the scent of a filthy room treated with the fabric freshener.
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