‘How Much Can I Learn From a Photograph?’
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Earlier this year I was contacted by the editors at Zum, a new Brazilian photography quarterly, who explained how they’d lately taken an interest in the photo-philosophical musings of the celebrated documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, Fog of War, Standard Operating Procedure, etc.), as evinced both in his recent book Believing is Seeing and his ongoing New York Timesblog, and wondered whether I’d be willing to undertake a conversation with Mr. Morris by way of introduction to their Brazilian readers. Since, as it happens, I’ve been having conversations with Errol for years, especially on his attitudes towards photography (and more especially about a continual tension I sense in those attitudes, between his insistence on the existence of an objective reality and the need to drill towards its expression, on the one hand, and his fascination with the bedeviling sorts of indeterminacies one encounters the deeper one drills, on the other), and, what’s more, these conversations have only become more intense the closer we come to this fall’s publication of Errol’s latest (A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald), I decided I’d be only too happy to oblige. What follows is the original English version of what the two of us came up with.
Lawrence Weschler (LW): Why don’t we start with the first chapter in your new book [Believing is Seeing], in many ways emblematic of all the rest, in which you spend over seventy pages interrogating two photographs taken by Roger Fenton in 1855 of a landscape after a battle in the Crimean War. Early on, you quote your friend Ron Rosenbaum: You mean to tell me that you went all the way to the Crimea because of one sentence written by Susan Sontag?
Errol Morris (EM): Well, actually it was two sentences. She began by claiming that many of the canonical images of early warfare photographs turn out to have been staged, or posed, whatever that might mean. And then she went on to offer, by way of example, the case of Roger Fenton, who “after reaching the much-shelled valley approaching Sebastopol… made two exposures from the same tripod position: in the first version of the celebrated photograph… the cannonballs are thick on the ground to the left of the road, but before taking the second picture—the one that is always reproduced—he oversaw the scattering of cannonballs on the road itself.”
LW: So what bothered you about that?