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)
We assume lies are fabrications, distortions, deliberate falsehoods. But refusing to acknowledge a truth is another form of lying. This is not a claim that a lie is fact, but a claim that a factual representation is a lie. To label a factual photograph untrue is to lie. (This type of “denial-based” falsehood is brother-in-arms to familiar modern irrationalisms: conspiracy theories, logical fallacies, pseudoscience, the invocation of false experts, culturally induced ignorance, and so forth. The common core ingredient: denial of fact.)
“Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”
—Chico Marx, (comedian, actor, film star, 1887–1961)
“It seems that photography has just been calisthenics, an illusion, an alibi for the real thing.”
—Saul Steinberg,(artist, 1914–1999)
“We’ve spent now about 150 years trying to convince ourselves that photographs are reliable evidence, some unimpeachable slice of the real world. That was a myth from the very beginning.”
—A.D. Coleman, (critic and writer, 1943– )
“The notion of the real and the fake has come full circle. We now tend to dismiss the real because it looks like a fake. The ‘truth’ is that in their own way, when all is said and done, all fakes and surrogates also become their own sort of original.” —Pedro Meyer, (photographer, 1935– )