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)
Transporting a photograph’s origin point from one time to another can change its meaning. The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time. Or, in the words of thinker John Berger, “The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.” Our Timeshifted category is a specialized subset of the Recontextualized typology. In fact, all photographs tinker with time—freeze it, seize it, stretch it, save it. The relationship between time and photography has been written about endlessly and is far too complex to summarize here. Suffice it to say, for photographs time is a uniquely important context. This is amplified by the interaction with internet time—a vast plain of equalized moments. On the internet, everything—past, present, and future—is now, at least in the only place that matters: the screen. In the high-flown rhetoric of the photo theorists, timeshifted photographs are “temporally displaced.”
“...a partial, but nonetheless astonishing description of the creative act at the heart of serious photography: nothing less than the measuring and folding of the cloth of time itself.”
—Paul Graham, (photographer, 1956– )
“As is often said of photography, this photograph is a frozen moment. A frozen moment is not a moment at all.”
—Roni Horn, (artist, 1955– )
“There really is no moment. The picture is the moment.”
—John Loengard, (photographer, editor, critic, 1934–2020)
“Despite having been awarded the dubious honor of arthood, all photography is still perceived as having one foot in the real world, a toe in the chilly waters of verisimilitude, no matter how often it is demonstrated that photographs can and do lie.” —Lucy R. Lippard, (critic and writer, 1936– )
“Photography is not a document on which a report can be made. It is a subjective document. Photography is a false witness, a lie.”
—Robert Doisneau, (photographer, 1912–1994)