In Salon today, Farhad Manjoo uses the infamous photo of two Iraqi boys with Lance Corporal Ted J. Boudreaux -- you know, the one that had the boys holding a sign that said "Lcpl Boudreaux killed my dad. then he knocked up my sister!" -- as a jumping-off point for a great meditation on photography and its slippery relationship to reality. There are competing versions of the Boudreaux photo out there, with different texts scrawled on the cardboard the boys are holding, and nobody is sure which one is real. It's fiendishly difficult to authenticate the photographic veracity of a text on a flat surface. You don't have the usual cues of light and shadow to guide you: the text is intrinsically more manipulable than other surfaces.
Manjoo interviews Ken Light, the photographer who took the original image that got photoshopped to show John Kerry with Jane Fonda. Light worries
that fake pictures will be mistaken for true pictures, rattling the political discourse. But a scarier proposition for him is that, in the long run, people will start to ignore real pictures as phonies. When every picture is suspect, all pictures are dismissible, Light fears, and photography's unique power to criticize will decline.
But opposed to this is the view of Mexican photographer Pedro Meyer, who thinks:
I'm not suggesting that a photograph cannot be trustworthy. But it isn't trustworthy simply because it's a picture. It is trustworthy if someone we trust made it. ... We don't trust words because they're words, but we trust pictures because they're pictures. That's crazy. It's our responsibility to investigate the truth, to approach images with care and caution. People need to realize that an image is not a representation of reality.
Manjoo also brings up Ed Lake, the Internet's "Fake Detective", who spends massive amounts of time combing Usenet for Photoshop fakes of nude celebrities. He posts them and points out the giveaway details. Lake is an obsessive collector of celebrity photographs, and his detective work is intended to provide legitimacy to his regular collection.
It's no accident that the obsessive collector's outlook goes hand in hand with a passion for identifying the real McCoy. A thing is only collectible if its authenticity can be identified over against things that are not authentic. Given something collectible, there will be obsessives who spend their time tracking down the reals and the fakes.
Ultimately I come down closer to Meyer's view than Light or Lake here. Light's photographs aren't carrying the truth within themselves like some precious irreplaceable cargo. Their truth arises textually, relationally: we know certain things about Ken Light (that he's a known photographer with a reputation for not manipulating his images) and thus we come to believe certain things about the subjects he communicates to us through his photos. It's Ken Light shining through those images, not the real world. But we get the real world too, albeit indirectly, because it's one of Light's concerns.
Posted by Chris at April 22, 2004 07:09 AM