I am perfectly happy to wait for luck to make its singular presence as long as I can do something when it evades me. In other words, luck is no longer the only alternative to coming up with a striking image. To a degree it is taking the control of the studio, out on the streets allowing us to make all sorts of new appointments between content and geometry.
The changes not always have to be very substantial, as in this picture taken in Rio de Janeiro (below). The main alteration I made had to do with the possibility of throwing out of focus the background, something that would normally be very sharp as happens when using wide angle lenses.
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| © Pedro Meyer |
My strategy was to concentrate the gaze of the viewer on the bald head of the woman, eliminating all distracting elements such as spot lights and the detail of people that would only detract from the main character.
Why would this picture be any less documentary than anything done previous to the use of digital images and computers? I don’t think that critics of such images, have really provided enough evidence to show us that the nature of photography has been anything other than enhanced through the process of digital technologies.
This picture was made in London, in the most straight forward traditional way of producing images. With a Leica camera, a very bright lens, negative black and white film which was then scanned.
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| © Pedro Meyer |
But what is that we are looking at? A woman committing suicide? A woman that has been left to die in the bath tub? We really don’t know. All that we can observe is that she is almost drowning and is trying to catch her last breaths of air. What is after all the reality of what we are looking at? My observations are derived from what I am able to see in the image, yet there is one element that will confuse the best of observers, not knowing where the image was taken.
As it turns out it was in a wax museum. And the lady in the bath is a wax figure, a portrayal of a very famous criminal act in London. However, nothing in this documentary picture provides us with the information that the event photographed is only a surrogate. What we believe we are looking at, has nothing to do with the reality behind the picture.
The fact that we can redefine content according to our expectations in a photograph lies at the very heart of why documentary images are really of questionable merit as true evidence of anything.
Digital photography has not changed the nature of documentary work in a negative way, as some would have us believe. On the contrary it has given this genre a new lease on life. We have always had documentary images that were misleading as to their content, there is nothing new in the nature of digital photography that does not have some precedents in the silver halide era or even before.
We should feel good, because there is a fuller awareness by the public of the potential for perverse manipulation of the photographic image (be it digital or analog). The fact that photography is no longer so credible, in a gullible sort of way, should give us pause for celebration, and not a reason to be concerned.
It is good that the photographic image has lost it’s aura of being a totally reliable source of information, something it is not, and never was, all of this lands us in a much safer place. Those in a position of power have to contend with a much more sophisticated audience, and the more damaging forms of exploitation can no longer take it for granted they will be trusted just because they present us with a photograph as evidence of something.
The last time I can recall of someone manipulating a world wide audience with some photographs, was General Colin Powell, at the United Nations, when he presented as evidence for the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq a few pictures that a year later he had to apologize for having done so.
Already at the time of the presentation at the UN, I had written an editorial in ZoneZero, stating that as “evidence” they could not be trusted, given the fact that they were only photographs and therefore subject to manipulated interpretations, which in time would be proven to be just that.
http://zonezero.com/editorial/febrero03/february.html
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It was more than thirty years ago that the same thing happened with regard to the alleged attacks by North Vietnam on US battle ships in the Gulf of Tonkin that later led to the war in VietNam. The information that was provided by President Lyndon Johnson, of the US, was all fabricated and repeated and amplified by the press. Those grainy pictures of the day, were part of the evidence that led people to believe in the reliability of the information. |
| I think we will love digital images for making us grow up and mature in understanding the very nature of documentary photography. |  |