“In Believing is Seeing Academy Award-winning
director Errol Morris turns his eye to the nature of truth in photography. In
his inimitable style, Morris untangles the mysteries behind an eclectic range
of documentary photographs, from the ambrotype of three children found clasped
in the hands of an unknown soldier at Gettysburg
to the indelible portraits of the WPA photography project. Each essay in the
book presents the reader with a conundrum and investigates the relationship between
photographs and the real world they supposedly record. During the Crimean War,
Roger Fenton took two nearly identical photographs of the Valley of the Shadow
of Death-one of a road covered with cannonballs, the other of the same road
without cannonballs. Susan Sontag later claimed that Fenton posed the first
photograph, prompting Morris to return to Crimea
to investigate. Can we recover the truth behind Fenton's intentions in a
photograph taken 150 years ago? In the midst of the Great Depression and one of
the worst droughts on record, FDR's Farm Service Administration sent several
photographers, including Arthur Rothstein, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans, to
document rural poverty. When Rothstein was discovered to have moved the cow
skull in his now-iconic photograph, fiscal conservatives-furious over taxpayer
money funding an artistic project-claimed the photographs were liberal
propaganda. What is the difference between journalistic evidence, fine art, and
staged propaganda? During the Israeli-Lebanese war in 2006, no fewer than four
different photojournalists took photographs in Beirut of toys lying in the rubble of
bombings, provoking accusations of posing and anti-Israeli bias at the news
organizations. Why were there so many similar photographs? And were the
accusers objecting to the photos themselves or to the conclusions readers drew
from them? With his keen sense of irony, skepticism, and humor, Morris reveals
in these and many other investigations how photographs can obscure as much as
they reveal and how what we see is often determined by our beliefs. Part
detective story, part philosophical meditation, Believing Is Seeing is a highly
original exploration of photography and perception from one of America's most
provocative observers.”
