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
Covid-19 is killing people in the streets. An overhead photograph from January 2020 shows scores of people dead on street, square, and sidewalk. The calamity is in China, or Italy, or a host of other places the coronavirus has struck with severity.
The Lie
On March 24, 2014, photographer Kai Pfaffenbach captured a memorial art project in Frankfurt, Germany. During the commemoration, people lay in the pedestrian zone in remembrance of a horrifying Holocaust death march that took place 45 days before the end of World War II. On the original date, March 24, 1945, inmates of the Katzbach concentration camp, part of the Adlerwerke industrial complex, were forced into a death march to the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau. Some 528 victims of Katzbach are buried in a collective grave at Frankfurt’s central cemetery.
