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)
Lies have been in photography from the beginning. Curator John Szarkowski famously described photography as “born whole” and that includes lies. “Nothing is as deceptive as a photograph,” states Franz Kafka. In the internet age, the possibilities of image creation and circulation have spread like oil on water, and so has the scope and ambition of lying with photographs.
This project constructs an analytic framework for classifying photographic lies, but we know that photographs have been unreliable messengers from the start. We are aware of the many precursor fictions far before our digital age: Hippolyte Bayard melodramatically staging a self-portrait of his death by drowning in 1840, Roger Fenton moving Crimean War cannonballs in 1855 for the sake of composition, Gustav Le Gray adding skies to Normandy seascapes by using a second negative in photography’s second decade, Oscar Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson undertaking complex combination printing in the 1850s and 60s, Alexander Gardner rearranging the rebel sharpshooter at Gettysburg, Francis Galton’s 1880s physiognomic composites. These and many more are outside the scope of this effort. We are concerned with photography in the internet age, photography turned up past ten.