Documentary and Photojournalism Wells pp 69-74

In reading Wells ‘Documentary and Authenticity’ I saw a strong connection between the authenticity of documentary imagery and reality television. The ‘difficulty of fidelity’ for photographers to capture images that reference the world is striking because of  our constant over exposure to images, and perhaps, a growing trend to question what images we see are real and what images are not. In 2010, Joaquin Phoenix and Casey Affleck created a Mockumentary titled “I’m Still Here,” that chronicled Joaquin Phoenix for roughly a years’ time, during which he claimed he was retiring from acting and becoming a rapper. The false claim was regarded by Phoenix and Affleck as a legitimate statement and Phoenix pursued the hip-hop career for much of the film. Affleck and Phoenix’s intentions in the Mockumentary were to see how many people would believe or not believe Phoenix’s new career aspirations, and they were surprised to find out how many people ‘bought’ the act. In a later interview with David Letterman, Phoenix revealed that he never expected so many people to believe his act, and that his and Affleck’s goal was to shed light on how fictional reality television is, and how a large percentage of people receive it as a true depiction or a mildly-staged portrayal of some people’s lives. The idea that so many people regard these TV shows to be real is disconcerting, because of technologies advancements that allow easy editing of digital imagery; this furthers Well’s notion that “one might imagine, any claim of documentary to be any more truthful to appearances than other forms of representation,” and that we have to be increasingly more selective in what he believe from seeing.