Photography is the art of telling stories with light. Millions of photographs evoke emotions and photographs have dramatically changed history, but there is something dishonest about photography. Something that begs the question: Is this a lie?
Over the years, photography has become synonymous with truth. In court, photographic evidence is deemed very strong. Rarely do people doubt the reality of an image. Sadly, some of the world's most famous photographs have a dark side to them. Some were staged, while others are a misrepresentation of the events.
Where is the difference between lies and creative storytelling? Are all photos that have ever been made lies?
I think no. While that's just my personal opinion, there must be a certain level of rationalism to this. By composing a photo, painting, or anything else, the artist makes active choices on what is in and what is out. There is no easy way out of this. Picking angle, focal length, and other parameters is just how photography works at the moment. It's a 2-dimensional representation of a scene.
Movie sets are not built to be real, but to represent reality in the frame. In a way, that renders the things outside of the frame useless, but so be it.
There are instances where composition can be a lie. One example would be in documentary photographs. Civil unrest and protest coverage are very good in showing that. Certain newspapers crop images in one way or another to convey a message that resonates better with the readership.
Here's how two different UK newspapers covered the toppling of the Colston statue. The two are on opposite ends of the political spectrum, which is quite interesting as the crops of the seemingly same photograph are different. One shows more of the crowd, while the other is centered on the statue. The editors are not leaving out an element per se, but they are guiding the readers to view things a certain way by cropping the image differently.
Humans lie: as sad as it sounds, it's true. Photographers are no exception, with the most famous example being one of the most celebrated war photographs ever taken. You'd ask, how can the community hail this photo as a documentary photo if it's telling a lie? Isn't documentary about truth? You'd be right to question other work Robert Capa produced. I do too.
Here’s an example of someone who was deemed unfriendly to the regime disappearing from the image:
As a side-note, the other people left in the photo got a 1930s makeover and airbrushing. Who doesn’t like asking good retouchers for a favor?
No comments:
Post a Comment