Eternally Conflicted

When I was in grad school at SF State, the topic of truth and photography came up regularly, in both my photojournalism and graphic design classes. Context, fleeting moments that happen in a fraction of a second and the power images contain were all part of the discussions as we tried to figure out what made a picture “truthful”.

In the last six months, a couple of high profile discussions have brought the topic to not only the general public, but the subjects in the photos themselves.

The first photo was a shot taken by Thomas Hoepker, a Magnum photographer who, while making his way to lower Manhattan on 9/11, took a few frames of a group of people talking on a sundrenched patio overlooking the river with the smoke billowing from the Trade Centers. Hoepker didn’t include it at first in a book Magnum made on the event, but found it later for a retrospective in Germany and it jumped out at him. Frank Rich, a New York Times columnist, wrote about the shot, then Slate magazine countered and eventually two people who were in the photo weighed in on what happened. Everybody has a different view of it. Even I see it differently now; I first saw it after reading Frank Rich’s column and only just today read the Slate article and the links inside it.

The second example come from the World Press Photo contest that recently picked its 2006 Photo of the Year. Spencer Platt’s picture is from the war between Lebanon and Israel last summer and shows a fashionable Lebanese group of friends in a red convertable touring the ruins in Beruit. Photo District News published a translated interview from a Belgian newspaper with the people in the car providing their take on the whole thing, as well as Platt’s view. This, of course, makes for a slight difference of opinion.

I think these discussions prove, if anything, that people bring their own perspective of the world around them to any picture they may see. As long as photojournalists are documenting what’s out there without the intention to decieve and without altering photos to make them look like something other than what was there, you can’t really blame the photographer for what a picture is saying to you. The problem the subjects of the photos in the above examples have is the perception people might have of them. That’s not the photographer’s fault.

Like the old saying goes, “If you ask 10 different photographers what they think of the same photograph, you’ll get 10 different opinions.”

I think the same goes for everyone else as well.