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)
Facts can lie. An ‘entirely accurate’ photograph can still be a falsehood. Science can be fiction.
The Claim
In the famous final “tangled bank” paragraph of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin writes of nature’s “elaborately constructed” creatures. He marvels at how natural selection produces “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful.” Among the elaborate constructions are appealing peculiarities such as the hammerhead salmander, Diplocaulus magnicornis, shown in this widely circulated photograph.
The Lie
The hammerhead salamander is a real creature, but it lived more than 250 million years ago. The extinct amphibian lived in North America and Africa in the Late Carboniferous to Permian (306 to 255 million years ago). Various species reached up to a meter in length. This photograph shows a scientifically accurate model by Osaka-based master model-maker Goro Furuta. This model —and the photograph of it—is wholly manufactured, but it also timeshifted Diplocaulus magnicornis from the Permian to humanity’s brief moment.
