Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Your new book, which seeks out the elusive truth behind several famous photographs, is called Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography. Tell us about the book and what its title means to you.
We think we know what we're looking at when we look at a photograph. We think we're looking at something objective. We think we can see reality. But often we’re just looking back at ourselves rather than out into the world. We are reinforcing our beliefs with what we see. The idea of my book is that there's a mystery in every photograph. What are we really looking at? In my experience, trying to figure out just what's going on inevitably involves an investigation. I like to think of myself as the new Sherlock Holmes of photography.
You describe Believing is Seeing as a series of detective stories. That's also how you've described many of your films throughout the years. You have moonlighted as a private investigator and have suggested you are an “existential detective”. Is detective work the vocation that bridges all your work?
I've been fortunate to receive a number of awards over the years, but the award I'm probably most proud of is my Edgar for The Thin Blue Line from the Mystery Writers of America. Yes, I worked as a detective years ago, and I think that almost everything I do – this book included – is of a genre that I guess you could call detective nonfiction.
In the introduction, you write that you grew up surrounded by photographs of a father you never knew, and that despite an early childhood operation to correct eye misalignment you never gained stereoscopic vision. How does this personal history fuel your interest in photography and documentary?
I am nearly blind in one eye, and I do not have 3D vision. I'm not a great candidate for making 3D movies. When I was growing up, my father – who died of a heart attack when I was two years old – was very much there in photographs, books and other objects of his. But at the same time, he was not there. A photograph makes people seem so real and close, but you're never really grabbing hold of them are you? They remain elusive. I often say that the biggest mystery of all is what’s inside the head – other people's as well as our own. You look at a photograph, or stare into someone's eyes, and you really never know. Trying to reconstruct the idea of a man from bits and pieces of evidence is a frustration.
The first set of essays in Believing is Seeing is about a pair of photographs from the Crimean War, taken in 1855 outside of Sevastopolin what was called the Valley of the Shadow of Death. For me, photographs like these – taken to document a historical event – are almost like a time machine. I fantasise about what it would be like to walk in the frame, look around and figure out what the photo really represents. Maybe that comes from looking at pictures of my father. Maybe it ties back to your detective question. Maybe they’re related.
Let’s get to the five books you’ve chosen, beginning with William Frassanito’s attempt to stitch together the history of the Battle of Gettysburg using photographs. Tell us about Gettysburg: A Journey in Time.
I was hard-pressed to come up with what kind of a list to give you guys. But it did occur to me that an attempt to reconnect with what we are looking at when we look at photographs is at the heart of the book that I've just written. So I thought I’d give you books that have attempted to do something along the same lines – books that come from kindred spirits.
Frassanito was obsessed with Gettysburg and with reconnecting photographs of the Civil War to the circumstances under which they were taken. Through this obsessive quest, he reconnects the photographs to actual geographic places and reorders them to reflect the real sequence of events. It's a deeply fascinating enterprise and I was inspired by his work.
In your film Standard Operating Procedure you undertook a similar project, reconstructing the history of Abu Ghraib through snapshots taken by the soldiers who policed the prison. At the same time you explored how photographing the abuses altered history. What did you learn about photography by making that film?
So many things. Yes, those photographs certainly altered the course of history. I also learned that they're among the most widely-distributed, widely-viewed photographs in history, on a par with the Zapruder film [the amateur footage of John F Kennedy’s assassination].
Another book I would like to mention is Josiah Thompson's Six Seconds in Dallas [about the Kennedy footage]. It's an early example of an attempt to do just what we're talking about – piecing together reality through photography, or in this case film. Thompson was a Kierkegaard scholar at Yale who went on to become an expert on what might be the most widely-seen piece of film in history. Not a still but a movie. Thompson attempted to analyse that film and reconnect it with reality. You would think that six seconds should be easy to interpret, but it turns out to be nothing of the sort. It evolves into a rabbit hole about the relationship between photography and reality.
Errol Morris is an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker. He has directed nine films, including The Fog of War, The Thin Blue Line and most recently Tabloid, and has won top awards from film festivals, film critics’ societies and the Directors Guild of America. Morris invented a camera called the Interrotron, that projects the face of an interviewer in front of its lens. He writes about issues ranging from email to epistemology for The New York Times. Believing is Seeing is his first book
A talented family, the Morrises. The answer to this question is, apparently, yes. Errol's brother, Noel, together with a co-student called Tom Van Vleck, did indeed write the first known programme for email, at MIT in 1965
Respectful introduction by Nobel prize-winning novelist, to stunning b/w photographs of 1970s Turkey by Ara Güler
