![]() The Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, by Alexander Gardner, Gettysburg, PA 1863 It is a photograph, but a heavily manipulated one that bears only the most tangential relationship to reality. It’s a ridiculous example, to make an exaggerated point. The Great White, the T-Rex, and the man at the edge of the cliff certainly never existed in the same space at the same time. They claim a superiority of the analog, chemical photograph because it is un-manipulated and therefore demonstrably “true”, whereas digitally generated photographs are untrustworthy because they can be easily manipulated into appearing to be true but in fact the things depicted never appeared in the same place at the same time in the same light when the exposure was made. They make this argument especially when arguing for an analog, chemical-based photography and against digitally generated photographs. They make statements such as photographs are accurate, true representations of the things photographed, they cannot lie because the objects photographed had to be in the same place at the same time in the same light in order to appear in the frame together. Many will assert that there is such a thing as “pure”, “true” photography, and that the specialness of photography as a medium is its fundamental relationship with truth. So what does this have to do with photography? I read many discussions among people with passionate feelings regarding the nature of photography. Facts are things that are provable – there is a rock on my desk. An example of this is that many contemporary practitioners of religion will argue that even if the historical facts surrounding the founding of their religion fall somewhere between muddy and non-existent, there is a greater Truth to the writings of their religious texts that extends beyond any need for factual accuracy. Truth is an absolute belief in the correctness of something, either without proof or even in the face of proof to the contrary. Quite the opposite – Truth is very closely tied to faith. The use of the Boolean binary of True or False (positive or negative) leads many people to believe that Truth is equally binary – something is True, or it is not. To define some terms before we go farther – there is a great deal of confusion about the difference between truth and facts. I would lay claim to the statement that photography now, and historically, has never really been about truth. Today I would like to tackle the question of photography and its relationship with truth. Perhaps surprisingly, there are still debates to this day as to what exactly photography IS – is it art, is it a mechanical reproduction tool, is it truth, is it false? And this debate continues to roil without conclusion one hundred eighty-one years after its public debut. (I’m calling this Part 1 because I’m sure I will want to revisit and/or expand upon this at a later date, perhaps multiple times) There are no “right” answers here – this is just an exercise to help bring clarity to your own working techniques, to refine them and hopefully bring success to your ongoing long-term projects (or help you get started on them!). We will execute our own mini-project over the duration of the class, using the ideas we discuss to help us guide our project and get a better understanding of our own working methods. We will use the text as a guide to introspection into our own process of working on projects – how we come up with projects, how we shoot those projects, how we decide when they’re done, how we edit those projects, and how we think of them as a body of work – will they be prints on a wall, a book, a website, or some combination thereof. The book consists of interviews with forty different photographers who work in long-term projects, asking each of them the same twelve questions. The foundational text for the class is Photo Work: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice., edited by Sasha Wolf. This course is about thinking about how we approach and execute photographic projects. I have a class coming up from March 4 to April 29, Understanding Your Practice – The Photo Project, at Glen Echo Photoworks.
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