by Art Chantry ( art@artchantry.com)
never EVER believe what you see. especially with photography. and ESPECIALLY in an era of digital imaging. every single tv commercial you see has CG worked into it. period. all fakery. nothing you see is real at all any more.
of course, ‘reality’ tv shows are scripted. television news is edited. cinematography is composed (angles, lighting, subject, mood, dialog). none of the stuff we feed ourselves as “proof” of anything has any merit at all any more. it’s all LIES. but, i suppose it sort of rests upon your definition of ‘lie’. it also depends upon you personal version of your reality. and precious few of us have the slightest grip on reality any more. we all live in a huge la-la land of fantasies.
when it comes to the photographic image, the very first photo was a lie. it was a very long exposure that resulted in an image of paris rooftops. the result looked more ‘real’ than any image ever produced by man before (it virtually destroyed the traditional role of painting.). but, it was only an illusion – it was just a very thin layer of light-reactive silver chemistry.
AC: andy warhol's early movies were real. all he did was turn on the camera and walk away. whatever showed up was ALWAYS left the viewer aware of that non-process, the 'reality' of the image/object. when it's all fake, it self-cancels the imitation of reality.
want a reality check on it? well, ok. the world is not hi-contrast black and white. it’s actually in color. honest. the image was a total falsehood. and the world is not flat. it’s in 3 dimensions. it’s true! the sky was not empty like you see in the first photo. in reality, there were clouds in the sky (and birds and insects.) so, that was yet that was a lie, too. the exposure was so long that anything that moved – even a snail – would not register in the photo chemical reaction long enough to leave a trace image. many of the first photographs of trees (taken in bright summer daylight) produce images of bare branches that look like the dead of winter. that’s because leaves vibrate in the slightest breeze.
in fact, the very first image of a human being in photography wasn’t even achieved until a year or two later – and it was an accident. it was a street scene of paris taken in the middle of the day. what was revealed in the murky grainy b&w image was an image of completely empty city streets with a single person standing in an awkward position with one leg raised into the air. at first everybody thought he’d use the “magic” of photography to capture a human spirit otherwise hidden from us – a ghost. but, what really happened is some anonymous guy was simply stopping (long enough) to get a shoe shine. that’s why his posture is so odd. it’s also why he stood still long enough to get captured in the image. a total accident.
another example? i recently found an old photo of the lincoln high school band of 1925 (tacoma). it’s one of those really long strip-like prints that is about 10 inches tall, but 3 feet long with the entire band lined up shoulder to shoulder (you’ve seen them). it’s pretty cool. my friend, denny flannigan, saw it and took interest. he immediately checked the guy sitting on the far left end (holding a clarinet). then he look at the guy sitting on the far right end (holding a trumpet). then denny laughed and pointed out it was the same guy! it was a common joke in these photos for the first guy at the end, who gets exposed first during the long slow exposure process to jump up and run down to the other end to re-pose himself twice in the image. start looking for this in those long photos. you’ll find it a lot.
another common technique is the manipulation of pose and setting. early photos were carefully posed and in constructed sets to help create the ‘painterly’ imagery accepted as reality at the time (it was what paintings and portraiture looked like, right?). that famous image of tesla sitting in a chair reading a book while one of his coils sends out scores of lightning bolts all a round him? real famous, tight? faked (double exposure) . all those unsmiling old folks with their stern faces making the olden days look so damned joyless? faked, as well (the people in the photos were holding their unsmiling poses for minutes on end. that joyless quality you see is the result of trying to stay perfectly still for five minutes or more.) worst of all, those cute little pictures of kittens and puppies and bunnies all dressed up in little outfits, playing instruments or pushing baby carriages full of other little kittens? just how did they get those little baby animals to stand still for these long exposures? they killed them first. most of those images are (in reality) images of cute little DEAD kittens and puppies and bunnies.
so, the point is, that you really never ever could trust the reality in photography. it just looks SO MUCH like the reality we accept around us. the illusion of photography is so good that we accept it as real – just like we do with television and movies and advertising. we don’t HAVE to, we just DO. we want to fit in and we WANT TO BELIEVE. a good example of this is the story of an anthropologist earlier in the century studying pygmy tribesmen living deep in the jungles of the congo without with little or no contact with the ‘modern’ world. when shown a photograph, they couldn’t decipher what it was. what i mean to say is, they couldn’t SEE the image (i think it was a cow.) the native was not trained by centuries of shared cultural experience to see a physically flat b&w image as anything but a collection of splotchy gradations and shapes and blobs. even after the anthropologist carefully traced and outlined the cow in the image, the native still could barely make it out
literally had to be TRAINED to physically SEE what we accept as ‘real’.
the image above is one of my all time favorite faked photos. i grew up with this image as total truth, always accepting it as 100% proof that lee harvey oswald was a commie sympathizer/possible soviet agent/assassin who was guilty without the slightest doubt.
this is a bad repro (a photocopy), but in the original image you can actually read that newspaper in his hand – and it’s a copy the soviet newspaper ‘Pravda’. that’s the rifle he used to shoot the president. no mention in history is made of that sidearm, however. that should have been a clue, but i wanted to BELIEVE.
in the 1980′s, the FBI finally admitted that this is a faked photo concocted to convince the public of the accuracy and quality of their field work. basically they wanted the american public they got their man and they got him fast (reality? got him by accident – pure luck.)
in reality, that’s not oswald in the photo. it’s an FBI agent (thus the sidearm) standing in a backyard (not even oswald’s) holding the rifle and the copy of Pravda. the face is, in reality, the police mugshot taken of oswald after thy caught him. it’s simply physically cut out with a scissors and pasted on the print of that posing agent. if you look at the shadows on the face and the shadows on the ground, you’ll plainly see that the light sources are coming from two different angles.
we are all trained to see what we’re told to see. we’re all trained to believe what we read. we’re all trained to think what we’re told to think. in all honesty, i’m a graphic designer. it’s my job to do this to you. i use all the nuances of visual language to help people ( aka ‘clients’) who pay me money to help them trick you into thinking what THEY want you to think. my clients want me to use my command of this visual language to get you to buy their product, go to their concert, vote for their candidate. that’s my ‘art.’
i have learned over a long time to try to be responsible with the power i rent out to folks. i try to only work for people i believe in, projects i support, ideas that improve the culture. of course, that leaves an awful lot up to my interpretation, doesn’t it?
no one is safe.
ADDENDUM:
AC: back in the early 90′s, at the dawn of the internet, genesis p. orridge (and some of his strategically positioned pals) attempted to make him the ‘evilest man in history’. they began to place him in images like the manson family photo album, the grassy knoll in dallas, joe stalin’s retinue (and hitler’s) alistair crowley’s surviving ritual images, etc. they also started to place his name in old documents as well. after all the GIGO that happened over the last few decades, his placement in history is still there where you least expect to find him. he BECAME the evilest man in history. look for him when you research stuff on the net. he’ll be around forever, now….
COMMENTS
