In Believing Is Seeing, Errol Morris investigates our relationship with photos--how we view them and what they mean to us. He uses several well-known photographs to flesh out some solid insights. One of the first insights is that we tend to look for motivations in a picture. What was the photographer trying to say? What is the guilt or innocence of the person in the picture? But Morris dismisses such attempts to infer anything beyond what the picture shows. Photos, he says, merely record data. But because we privilege
vision, we imagine that photos provide a door to the
truth. And in our imagining, we make false inferences and draw hasty, faulty conclusions.Morris also questions and ultimately dismisses the idea that posed photos cannot serve as documentation and are inauthentic; the fact that something is always excluded from view (intentionally or not) while other things are included means that all pictures are posed to some degree. (This vein of discussion mirrors parts of modern rhetorical theory.)
Most of Believing Is Seeing is a super interesting read. My only complaint is that Morris strayed too far into the weeds in the last section when he forensically examines a set of documentary photos and their related documentation from public works projects of the Depression.
Note:
The book's full title is Believing Is Seeing: Observations On the Mysteries of Photography.
