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)
Photography is based on omission. What is left out of the frame is at least as important as what is included. Left and right, above and below, before and after. Impose a frame and you impose a framework. Leave key items out of the frame and change the meaning. Composition, crop, exclusion, angle of view determine—or distort or entirely recast—meaning.
“Photographic cropping is always experienced as a rupture in the continuous fabric of reality.”
—Rosalind Krauss, (writer, critic, historian, 1941– )
“Photography pretends. You can see everything that’s in front of the camera, but there’s always something beside it.”
—Thomas Ruff, (photographer, 1958– )
“For a long time I’ve lived with the inadequacy of that frame to tell everything I knew, and I think a lot about what is outside of the frame.”
—Susan Meiselas, (photographer, 1948– )
“A photograph has edges, the world does not.”
—Stephen Shore, (photographer, 1947– )
“When you crop the photo, you tell a lie.”
—Douglas Coupland, (writer, 1961– )