Petroglyphs

There were no photographs in the lives of our ancient ancestors.  People living before the camera obscura was invented had to scratch, paint or perhaps chisel images into some natural medium or another.  Those images were more clearly subjective impressions than is most modern photography.  Petroglyphs, cave paintings, works on wood and stone, all crude, all severely limited in their ability to communicate with others.  In that age, people knew that the scratchings were not the whole story and generally judged the world by what they saw, heard, smelled and felt physically and emotionally.  A person living in the Sahara knew nothing about the life of a person living in the Arctic and vice versa, but both understood their own world intimately.  The worlds that those persons knew were bounded by what they saw, heard, felt and experienced.  That is different today.  Today, we “learn” about other places not only by seeing them first hand, but more commonly, through words, recordings and pictures.  The experience is heightened by the introduction of video and movies.  We sit in our living room, flick on the television or fire up the tablet and watch hours of video complete with sound.  We feel as though we are there - wherever that particular there happens to be at that particular moment.

Wedding

Video and photographs are without doubt powerful, important, and useful but they do not convey everything that first hand experience does.  Not only that, they can be edited to downplay or eliminate some selected subject matter while emphasizing other subjects.  No matter how carefully one puts photojournalism together, it is always, by definition, a reflection of what is in the editor’s head.  The same is true whether it is video or individual images captured by a still camera.  A wedding photographer sees a story that a bride wants told and chooses to exclude the drunken relative seen pestering the groom while emphasizing the little flower girls arranging the bride's dress.  An advertising executive sees a flaw in the product and chooses to photograph it from a different angle.  An architectural photographer waits for the exact time of day that the shadows strike correctly as seen from exactly the right direction. A war correspondent selectively chooses subject matter to reflect well on the side that he favors (and all war

Turkish Tanker

correspondents favor one side or the other no matter how altruistic their commentary).  Etc, etc, etc…  Photographers are story tellers and their photographs are but part of the story that is there to be told.  Perhaps accurate, perhaps not, but rarely, if ever, complete.  

I suggest that we are deluding ourselves as to exactly how smart we really are about what is going on around us.  Some are talking about distinguishing between fake news and real news, but I make the argument that everything that we think that we know from books and pictures is, to some extent or another, fake - or, at the very least, nuanced and incomplete.  How should a photographer deal with that situation?  Should we care?  Does it make any real difference?