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)
Crowd photographs crowd social media. The reason is straightforward: crowd size is a proxy for support. Each person in a photograph is viewed as a vote for a cause. In the hazy world of social media, secondhand power is real power. This secondhand power is why crowd photographs are so often timeshifted, relabeled, recontextualized.
The Claim
A photograph depicts a vast crowd of Trump supporters in Washington, D.C. on January 5, 2021. This is one day ahead of the now infamous January 6, 2021 “Save America” rally and attack on the Capitol. The photograph is shared widely on social media, especially in the moment. “Take back our country,” said the President the following day, waving black-gloved fists into the winter chill. His supporters stormed the Capitol.
The Lie
The photograph is timeshifted from more than two years earlier. It actually shows the 2018 “March for Our Lives” demonstration for tougher gun-control laws. The image was made March 24, 2018 by photographer Salwan Georges and appeared on the front page of the Washington Post. The headline: “In grief, marching for change.” The caption: “Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators crowd downtown Washington on Saturday for the March for Our Lives rally to call for stricter gun-control measures.”
