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
A “Muslim immigrant” attacked a Swedish child for having blue eyes. The evidence: crescents of stitches below both eyes in a tightly framed photograph of a fair-skinned child. In the cascade of retweets, a self-proclaimed Trump supporter made a claim typical of most: “12 yr old Swedish boy beaten by Islamic terrorists because his eyes are blue!”
The Lie
Sophie Willis, age four, was attacked at her home in Cardiff Bay, Wales by Kaizer, the family’s recently adopted Rottweiler stray. Sophie required twenty stitches. Kaizer was destroyed. Since the April 2008 attack, the appropriated photograph of Sophie has regularly resurfaced to back false racist and xenophobic claims with mutable photographic evidence.
