ERROL MORRIS

in Conversation with Paul Holdengräber

November 2, 2011

LIVE from the New York Public Library

www.nypl.org/live

Celeste Bartos Forum

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You’re all here because you know who Errol Morris is, and for the last few years, instead of reading long biographies, all the movies they’ve made, all the books they’ve written, I’ve changed the way of doing it slightly by asking the guests who come to write a seven-word biography, a tweet of sorts, a haiku if you’d like, and so Errol Morris sent me these seven words, and he behaved very well, because he gave me exactly seven words, and with these seven words I’d like to bring him to the stage. He wrote: “autodidact, necrophile, voyeur, filmmaker, opinionated writer,” and finally, “father.” Errol Morris.

(applause)

ERROL MORRIS: Thank you.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: A pleasure to have you back here.

ERROL MORRIS: Thank you very much.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Truly a pleasure.

ERROL MORRIS: I’m not sure how fast I can talk, and I don’t have a foreign accent. (laughter) I hope that will be okay.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You know, when people ask me where my accent is from I just tell them it’s affected. I mean, it took years and years to develop. Not easy.

ERROL MORRIS: It’s very, very good.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You like it?

ERROL MORRIS: I do, yes.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I’d like us to begin, if we could, with an image. I think that’s quite appropriate given the subject tonight, and I’d like us to pull up the image number nine.

ERROL MORRIS: Seen it before. What is it?

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Yes, what is it? I think that’s a very good way of beginning, because in a way your book is a long investigation into “what is it?” What is it that we are seeing? What is it when we open our eyes? What are we seeing, what are you seeing, why did you choose this image?

ERROL MORRIS: I’m not sure where I first saw that image. It’s in Wittgenstein, it’s in a philosopher who I read many, many years ago, Norwood Russell Hanson, in a book Patterns of Discovery. It’s a familiar image from gestalt psychology, the rabbit and the duck, the fact that the image can be seen at least in two different ways. If you like, the ambiguity of the image, I would probably add the ambiguity of all images, and, yes, I believe it also appears in my book.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You’re right.

ERROL MORRIS: Because my book, if it’s about anything—and I hope it’s about something—is about the ambiguity of images, how we interpret them in so many diverse ways and also an attempt to investigate images, perhaps in a way that is rarely done. It’s clear to people—if I’m going on at too much length, I can be stopped at any time, just yell at me. When photography first came into existence in the beginning of the nineteenth century, people were well aware of the fact that it was connected to reality. If you like, there was this causal connection between a photographic image and the world in which it was taken. Nowadays that connection is often lost and what this book tries to do is reestablish that connection.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Is that what you mean, because I wouldn’t have used that word myself to describe what you’re attempting for us to do when we look at images is to see them as ambivalent.

ERROL MORRIS: Yes and no.

(laughter)

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Do you want to leave it at that?

ERROL MORRIS: Well, I should let Paul interpret the images that I discuss probably than doing it myself. The first essay in this book, Believing is Seeing, I’m talking about a conversation with a friend of mine, Ron Rosenbaum, about Susan Sontag’s book On Regarding the Pain of Others.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Let’s look at image number two.

ERROL MORRIS: Uh-oh. This is considered by many people to be the first iconic war photograph, taken by Roger Fenton in the Crimea outside Sevastopol. It’s known as the Valley of the Shadow of the Death because of the number of cannonballs that were lobbed into this gulley. My friend Ron said, “You mean you went all the way to the Crimea because of your annoyance with one sentence in Susan Sontag?” And I said, “Well, no it was actually two sentences.” And yes I did go to the Crimea, well I went to this place in the Crimea, to the Valley of the Shadow of Death, as part of my investigation into this photograph. By the way, I don’t know if anyone is interested. It turns out that this land is for sale, (laughter) so I kept telling people, this is taking it a step beyond what I could have ever dreamed. I can imagine reading the Twenty-third Psalm, but imagine owning (laughter) the Twenty-third Psalm, the Valley of the Shadow of Death time-shares.

(laughter)

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Let’s look at image number three.

ERROL MORRIS: An irresistible idea. By the way, we could perhaps do a deal right here in this room if anyone is interested. Yeah, there are two photographs. Fenton made a mistake, I guess you could consider it a mistake. He took two photographs instead of one, the camera’s mounted on a tripod, and he takes these two photographs which are, for all intents and purposes, identical, save for the fact that in one of them there are cannonballs on the road and in the other there are not cannonballs on the road. I call them “Off” and “On.” This would be “On,” and if you want to see the previous—

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Number two.

ERROL MORRIS: Yes, there you go. That would be “Off,” no cannonballs on the road.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And then we can look at five and six, just to give a sense of the obsessive nature of the book. Five and six.

ERROL MORRIS: Yeah, the book is obsessive but I am not. (laughter) Make things absolutely clear. So the claim was that Fenton had posed that second photograph. He had posed “On,” and so I had this picture of Fenton lugging these cannonballs around in the landscape and positioning them for whatever reason, but the conclusion was that the second photograph, the photograph with the balls on the road, “On,” was posed, a posed photograph, and as we all know, posed photographs are a big no-no. You’re not supposed to pose photographs. How could he? So all kinds of crazy questions were raised by this complaint. One writer, a German writer, Ulrich Keller, even suggested that Fenton was trying to convince people that he was in great danger by putting the cannonballs on the road, it was a way of committing a kind of fraud.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: We know this because there are letters, right, from the cameraman who felt that maybe this was the last time he would take a photograph.

ERROL MORRIS: We know that this area was not a really great place to hang out, and I read all kinds of diaries. This is like an early example of trench warfare. People were dug in outside of Sepastoval and basically for months on end, people just hurled these large cannonballs back and forth at each other.

I have one diary that’s not in my book that I adore, guy is writing in this beautiful handwriting and it breaks off and the handwriting changes. Actually, the beautiful handwriting is unreadable. The handwriting which is really awkward that follows is completely legible and he describes how he was working at his diary and a cannonball came along and blew off his right arm and so after a tourniquet being applied, he continued on with his left hand.

No, no, this was a dangerous place. Maybe Fenton wasn’t taking these photographs at the height of the artillery fire. Aside from all this, what interested me is how did Sontag know all of these things? First of all, how did they know which photograph came first, how did they know which was posed? Maybe the cannonballs were there and the second photograph was posed because the cannonballs were removed, and on and on and on and on.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Plus, you, you—one of the criticisms you voice against Sontag’s interpretation is that she discusses all this in a rather cavalier, quick way without the photograph, without even giving us the possibility of looking at it carefully.

ERROL MORRIS: What I like about photographs, and all the photographs discussed in this book, is that they’re wormholes into history. Think of them as a time machine. These two pictures, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, what if I could walk into the picture itself, look around, and ask myself what am I really looking at, what is really there, what is the reality that this photograph is in part recording? And that’s what I try to do in each instance. It’s the mystery of what we’re looking at, if you like, going back to the rabbit and the duck. The mystery of what is it? I didn’t mention this in the book itself, but I made a whole movie about the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib, and two of the chapters in this book concern those photographs. And this was another annoyance with the Sontag book because she had said that the photographs at Abu Ghraib were obvious, that we could all assume that we knew what we were looking at. Well, I don’t think we can ever assume that we know what we’re looking at.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You have a strong claim against people who will say that something is obvious.

ERROL MORRIS: At least in this instance.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: The least obvious thing is what it is obvious.

ERROL MORRIS: Nothing is so obvious that it’s obvious. So, yes, it’s an attempt to, if you like, walk into a series of photographs, and examine what are we really looking at?

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Let’s look at image number eight. In many ways I think this image, which is also included in your book in one of the chapters is another image where we think at first we’re looking at something and then we find out that it’s something else. And I’m particularly interested by that something else not only in terms of how misleading the first attempt to understand this photograph was, but also what you have to say about the very person holding up that photograph.

ERROL MORRIS: The photograph he’s holding is perhaps the most widely distributed photograph in history. I often describe it as the iconic photograph of the Iraq War. Someone took me to task for it, not my fault, really. A photograph becomes iconic for many, many, many reasons. And I do believe ten, twenty, thirty years or more out, this will be the defining photograph of that conflict.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Why?

ERROL MORRIS: An image of torture, resonant in so many ways. To many people it appears to be a crucifixion scene, it has a kind of religious context, for many people a symbol of the fall of American exceptionalism, and on and on and on and on, we could talk about this photograph and its meaning to so many people. People in this country, people abroad. What’s interesting is how controversial iconic images become, yet often people don’t really try to investigate the circumstances of how they were produced. One exception, of course, is the raising of the flag on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, which has been the subject of movies and books, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, but usually these photographs remain mysterious and controversial.

When I saw this picture, which appeared on page one of the New York Times, this is very, very early on when I started writing for the Times about three years ago. I knew there was something wrong with it because I was in the middle of making this movie about Abu Ghraib, and I knew the soldiers who had been present when this photograph had been taken, the soldiers who had taken many of these photographs, and I knew that the man who claimed that he was the man on the box was in fact not the man on the box at all. Why is any of this interesting? I mean, this is a question. Why should we care?

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: More than interesting, why is it so urgent and important to you?

ERROL MORRIS: Because investigating the world, trying to uncover the nature of reality, seems to be the greatest of all enterprises. I believe it’s at the heart of journalism, what really happened, what really occurred, what was there. And these may seem like very simple kinds of questions, but they seem to me truly important. Yes, it may be these two photographs taken over a hundred and fifty years ago in a war that people scarcely remember, but the issues involved in them are really significant issues that affect us as we speak. It’s really no different a hundred and fifty years later. Also, I’m a connoisseur of error. I’m fascinated by mistakes and why people make mistakes.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: In this particular case, because you haven’t yet quite told us the riddle here. There is a misattribution.

ERROL MORRIS: You know, the guy claimed he was the man on the box, and he wasn’t the man on the box. Someone else was. He was, if you like, an imposter, although he was there during that same period—he was a prisoner at Abu Ghraib—and many people would say to me, “Well, wasn’t he tortured as well? Why is it so important that you identify who that man was and you make the point that this was not him?” And my answer would be the truth is always relevant, and finding out the circumstances of what we’re looking at. One of the great dangers in photography is that photographs give us that feeling that we know what we’re looking at. They give us that confidence that there’s no problem here, when in fact there may be many, many, many kinds of problems. I’m still not answering your question.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: No, no, we’re slowly getting in the direction of what I feel such an urgent plea in your book, which is, well, first of all the experience as I’ve told you when we first spoke of reading this book—it’s an illustration of what Calvino talks about when he talks about festina lente, “take haste slowly,” and you are deeply involved in us—I mean you grab the bone and won’t let go. You make us look at these images and analyze them with an attention to detail, an attention actually. You cannot skim this book. I mean, you can, but the book is an attempt in some very strong way to—as there’s a movement of slow food, there’s a movement of slow reading, and there’s a movement of slow seeing, and though the book has as a subtitle “Mysteries of Photography,” it might as well have been called “The Mysteries of Looking,” and the miracle in some way of looking and at the same time the difficulty and nearly folly of believing that you might be able to arrive at some semblance of truth and yet at the same time there is a real attempt at dispelling the notion that truth in any form or fashion is relative.