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)
Politics is a belief system so strong its gravity exerts tidal force on other beliefs. Under politics’ pull, the incredible becomes credible, fiction becomes fact.
The Claim
A photograph from the first Intifada (1987–1993), shows a Palestinian boy shot through the heart by Israeli occupation forces. The image has been widely circulated on social media. In one instance, the photograph is accompanied by this text: “The unarmed Palestinian boy just after being shot by an Israeli Police giving his last and freezing look at his killer. Why doesn’t this picture become viral and shared by people on their Facebook wall? Why? Why? Why?”
The Lie
The photograph is fiction, a still frame from a film. Kingdom of the Ants[Mamlakat al-Naml] is a 2012 film by Tunisian director Chawki al-Majri, primarily known as a director of cliché-inclined television dramas. In Kingdom of the Ants, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is seen through the history of one family whose only true inheritance is the Palestinian political struggle.
