Jan 31: Sturken & Cartwright, Images, Power and Politics (1-44)

Let's cut to the chase.

I'm glad I now have a name for something that's been on and off my mind for I don't know how long: The Myth of Photographic Truth. I couldn't agree more with the positions discussed in this portion of the reading. Sure, technically what you see in any photograph did technically happen exactly as you see in the photograph. What some fail to realize, though, is that just like a painting is the creation of its painter, a photo is the creation of its photographer. The bias, in fact, could be even more misleading in a photo than a painting because at least with a painting, we know we are looking at an artist's version of reality; even if the intent is to be as accurate as possible, the accuracy of the painting relies to a great extent on the artist's skill.

Inaccuracies in a picture, though, come solely from the photographer's choices. They come not from what we see, but from how it is shown and what is missing. A photographer most likely would have wandered around the scene several times, looking at various angles, lighting conditions and positions of the subjects before he even bothered to take his first picture. Any pictures he took only exist because he willed them to exist, and this only happened because he found something particularly interesting, satisfying or otherwise appealing in the combination of features in the shot. Consciously or not, this type of thing is bound to happen because of the human element.

So how do we go about fixing this? Should we? Can we? It seems rather impossible to do the latter, particularly because the ones looking for potential bias are more imperfect, biased humans. Would we need some sort of national standard for measuring bias? Ignoring the fact that it would be impossible due to the aforementioned imperfections in our species, where exactly would we draw the line between over-analytical paranoia and cleverly disguised bias? Was this slight overexposure to the film a deliberate attempt at manipulating the reader, or did the reader create his own meaning? Such questions are most likely unanswerable, given how bias is something deeply rooted in our subconscious, especially when we're trying to be as objective as possible.

Until we invent something better, I think we'd all benefit if we admitted that while not perfect, the camera is the closest thing we have to a scientific tool for registering reality. Bias is something we can't control; instead, it controls how and where we aim our cameras, and even whether or not the picture is worth taking at all.

Bias aside, there's still more to reality than what is captured in the lens of a camera.