The Picture Problem by Malcolm Gladwell addresses a problem in photography that has been around since its invention in the early 1800's; the fact that not only are photographs not inherently true but if you do believe that what you are seeing is true, your interpretation of that truth may be different than the person sitting next to you. Photographs in any form are all about trust, whether you trust your own ideas and opinions of an image, the photographer that took the image, or whether or not you trust the person that is interpreting the image for you. Both of the subjects in this article highlight the difficulty of expertly interpreting an image that can only give you half the story. Because you can only get so much information from something like a satellite image of part of the Earth or an X-ray of a breast, you need people to employ their expertise of the subject and tell you what to think.
In the case of the Gulf War, when the United States Air Force was trying to identify and destroy trucks carrying missiles and all they had were images that were taken from thousands of feet above the site they were watching. People analyzed the images and determined which trucks to target. Follow-up research showed that none of the targets they went after were in fact carrying missiles or dangerous.
In researching the validity of mammography and its ability to be affective, researchers presented radiologists with a 150 different mammograms. The fluctuation of their opinions on whether or not the women in the X-rays had cancer was astounding.
These two examples of how much an opinion of an image can vary shows that while images are good tools for drawing conclusions, they are not absolute and neither are a single persons impressions of an image.
2 comments:
Troy, I think what you said about trust is really important in relation to photography as an artistic medium. Your point about the multiple forms of trust across the conception, realization, and response of and to a photograph is an interesting take on the roles of the artist and the audience. As Gladwell stated, it has become a cultural reflex that photography is inherently truthful, which raises questions about whether the audience expects the photographer to be impartial, or whether the audience connects to specific photographers for their unique portrayals.
Troy, I think that you bring up a great point about the trust factor of photography. People want to and often do trust photographs and hold them synonymously with truth. Your comments on the viewer having to decide if they trust the photographer made me think of the responsibility that photographers might have in a greater social context. If on a cultural level photography and truth hold a connection, as Andrew said above, is it then the responsibility of the photographer to make sure that this connection is maintained? Or is it the opposite, should photographers be putting doubt in the public's mind about the extent to which photographs should be trusted? Just food for thought.
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