July 10, 2007, 2:14 pm
Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire
By Errol Morris
Pictures are supposed to be worth a thousand words. But a picture unaccompanied by words may not mean anything at all. Do pictures provide evidence? And if so, evidence of what? And, of course, the underlying question: do they tell the truth?
I have beliefs about the photographs I see. Often – when they appear in books or newspapers – there are captions below them, or they are embedded in explanatory text. And even where there are no explicit captions on the page, there are captions in my mind. What I think I’m looking at. What I think the photograph is about.
I have often wondered: would it be possible to look at a photograph shorn of all its context, caption-less, unconnected to current thought and ideas? It would be like stumbling on a collection of photographs in a curiosity shop – pictures of people and places that we do not recognize and know nothing about. I might imagine things about the people and places in the photographs but know nothing about them. Nothing.
This collection could even involve my own past. I recently was handed a collection of photographs taken by my father – dead now for over fifty years. I looked at it, somewhat confused. I suppose saddened by the passage of time. Even though I am in the photographs, the people in them are mysterious, inherently foreign. Maybe because photographs tamper with the glue that holds life and memory together.
Who are these people? Do they have anything to do with me? Do I really know them?
As disconnected from the present as these photographs might be, they do not seem devoid of context. I know too much about them – even if I know very little. They are pictures of my own family. It’s too easy for me to concoct some story about them. To find a picture shorn of context, it would be important to pick a photograph that’s sufficiently removed for me in time and context – a photograph preternaturally unfamiliar. Perhaps a war photograph, but a war photograph from an unfamiliar war. It should be a war six or seven wars ago. Passions, presumably, have been diminished. No one in the photographs will still be alive.
I want to ask a relatively simple question. Are these photographs true or false? Do they tell the truth?
Look at the photograph below. Is it true or false?
I find the question ridiculous: “True or false in regard to what?”
Without a caption, without a context, without some idea about what the picture is a picture of, I can’t answer. I simply cannot talk about the photograph as being true or false independently of beliefs about the picture. A captionless photograph, stripped of all context, is virtually meaningless. I need to know more.
And yet, this idea that photographs can be true or false independent of context is so ingrained in our thinking that we are reluctant to part with it.
Let’s add a caption to the photograph.
The Lusitania
Only now can we ask questions that have true or false answers. The caption asserts that this is a photograph of the Lusitania, a British ship launched in 1907. I found the photograph on a website entitled “Maritime Quest.” I made no effort to check it; I simply took their word for it. That could be a mistake on my part. With no malice intended, the wrong caption could have inadvertently been placed under the photograph. The photograph could actually be a photograph of the Titanic. Or malice could have been involved. Someone could have maliciously switched the captions of pictures of the Lusitania and the Titanic.
But one thing is clear. When I look at these pictures – whether it is a picture of the Lusitania or the Titanic – I imagine that someone stood on a dry dock, or some vantage point, looked through the viewfinder of the camera, and took a photograph of something that was floating out there in the water. If it was the Lusitania, then he took a photograph of the Lusitania. If it was the Titanic, then he took a picture of the Titanic. This may seem hopelessly obvious, but I have this saying – and I believe there’s something to it – that there is nothing so obvious that it’s obvious.
But we need language, and we need context, in order to know which ship it is, and a host of other sundry facts.
In discussing truth and photography, we are asking whether a caption or a belief - whether a statement about a photograph — is true or false about (the things depicted in) the photograph. A caption is like a statement. It trumpets the claim, “This is the Lusitania.” And when we wonder “Is this a photograph of the Lusitania?” we are wondering whether the claim is true or false. The issue of the truth or falsity of a photograph is only meaningful with respect to statements about the photograph. Truth or falsity “adheres” not to the photograph itself but to the statements we make about a photograph. Depending on the statements, our answers change. All alone — shorn of context, without captions — a photograph is neither true nor false.
But why this photograph? It’s so terribly bland. I wanted to begin this series of essays on photography with an image chosen particularly for its blandness. Removed in time, far from our core knowledge, it is unfamiliar. We know little about it. We most likely do not recognize it as the Lusitania. We might think it’s an early-20th-century ocean liner, and perhaps even imagine it may be the Titanic – at which point we have placed a kind of mental caption under the photograph, and we begin to see the photograph in terms of our associations and beliefs, about what it seems to say about reality.
It is also interesting how a photograph quickly changes when we learn more about what it depicts, when we provide a context, when we become familiar with an underlying story. And when we make claims about the photograph using language. For truth, properly considered, is about the relationship between language and the world, not about photographs and the world.
So here’s a story.
On the evening of May 7th, 1915, the RMS Lusitania was off the coast of Ireland en route to Liverpool from New York when it was torpedoed by a German U-Boat and sank. Nearly 2,000 passengers and crew drowned, including 128 Americans. The loss of life provoked America out of a hereunto neutrality on the ongoing war in Europe. With cries of “Remember the Lusitania” the U.S. entered into WWI within two years.
To modern viewers, this image of the Lusitania is emotionally uncharged, if not devoid of interest. But to a viewer in the summer of 1915, it was charged with meaning. It was surrounded many, many other photographs, images and accounts of the sinking of the Lusitania, a cause celèbre.
Let’s look at some of these other images.
“ENLIST” was a WWI Recruitment poster designed by Fred Spears. Spears’ design was inspired by a news report from Cork, Ireland, that described, among the recovered bodies from the Lusitania, “a mother with a three-month-old child clasped tightly in her arms. Her face wears a half smile. Her baby’s head rests against her breast. No one has tried to separate them.”
And here is a photograph from the same period with the following caption.
“SOME OF THE SIXTY-SIX COFFINS BURIED IN ONE OF THE HUGE GRAVES IN THE QUEENSTOWN CHURCHYARD”
The caption is from a two-page pictorial spread in the May 30, 1915, New York Times: “BURYING THE LUSITANIA’S DEAD AND SUCCORING HER SURVIVORS”.
One more photograph and an accompanying article from the Toronto Star.
The photograph is of a pocket watch. We learn from the accompanying article that the watch belonged to Percy Rogers and that the watch stopped at exactly 2:30 after “ticking off 30 of the most terrible minutes in history.” Mr. Rogers was in a stateroom when the torpedo struck the Lusitania. He spent his last minutes on board helping women and children climb into lifeboats. Then he climbed into a lifeboat as well. And then the ship sank. The last paragraph of the article is memorable. It quotes “the official German statement” following the sinking of the Lusitania: “Every German heart is filled with joy, pride and gratification.”
Now look at the photograph of the ship one more time.
The image remains the same, but clearly we look at it in a different way.
Is that really a photograph of the Lusitania? When was it taken? Could it have been taken on May 7, 1915? If it was, what was the exact time that it was taken? Two o’clock? Two fifteen? Just seconds before the German torpedo hit? Ah, can we see the torpedo in the water? Is that the mother and her child (depicted in the poster) standing on the deck looking out over the water? Is that Percy Rogers with his pocket watch, helping that same woman and child climb into a lifeboat?
The idea that photographs hand us an objective piece of reality, that they by themselves provide us with the truth, is an idea that has been with us since the beginnings of photography. But photographs are neither true nor false in and of themselves. They are only true or false with respect to statements that we make about them or the questions that we might ask of them.
The photograph doesn’t give me answers. A lot of additional investigation could provide those answers, but who has time for that?
Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but there are two words that you can never apply to them: “true” and “false.”
Credits: Photo of the Lusitania courtesy of Michael W. Pocock an