UCR ARTS: California Museum of Photography
Curated by Douglas McCulloh
Lies are ever-present in human affairs, a tidal flow that rises and falls. Recently, lies have been at flood stage and photographs are central to the surge.
Statements, strings of words, are readily seen as assertions, claims. Photographs, on the other hand, are presumed to be a form of evidence. In Susan Sontag’s phrase, we assume photographs are “directly stenciled off the real.” Consequently, photographs, even dubious ones, carry credence in a way that words do not. Moreover, writes theorist Lev Manovich, “the reason we think that computer graphics technology has succeeded in faking reality is that we, over the course of the last hundred and fifty years, have come to accept the image of photography and film as reality.” For these main reasons and scores of lesser ones, photographs are ideal vehicles for lies. (Read More)
The Claim
The dramatic photo shows the California wildfires of August 2018. The radiance of the California conflagration glows through a stitched deck of altocumulous. Cloud cover lit by fire gleams psychotic orange, cherry red. What the photograph signals depends on social mindset and ranges from a dire warning of climate change to a harbinger of Biblical end times.
The Lie
The photograph is a Hawai’ian sunset. It was taken in July 2018 by U.S. Air Force aviator Nathan Province from a C-17 at 30,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean near Oahu. The low-angle setting sun lights a mid-level cloud layer from below. The result is remarkable, but the image is not California, not fires, not volcanoes, not the end of the world.
