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)
Our world is called into being by cameras. The moment, the angle, the covert misrepresentation, the persuasive lie. Nothing is certain. The photograph transforms everything.
The Claim
The report is alarming. Soaring summer temperatures in Arizona have reached the point they are melting cars. The evidence is photographic: plastic bumpers and tail lights sag raggedly from black sedans and smear sun-baked asphalt. “Arizona State in anguish,” lament the posts. “It is so hot, cars are melting!”
The Lie
The photograph is unaltered, the cars genuinely melted, the site truly Arizona. But the sun is uninvolved and has a solid alibi. At the time of the incident, it is on the other side of the planet. The camera angle clips the actual heat source from the frame. In the early morning hours of June 19, 2018, a three-alarm construction site fire causes 8 to 10 million dollars damage and, along the way, melts a dozen cars parked at Tucson’s University Vista Apartments across the street. The photographer of the viral photograph is unknown, but the image has lived a dozen lives. It appears as evidence that scorching weather is melting automobiles in Kuwait, in Oman, in Saudi Arabia.
