The truest possible lie.

The photograph. It’s supposed to be a high fidelity reproduction of a slice of space and time, frozen for as long as the medium it is captured on can survive. Imagine the horror of archivists everywhere when they realized that the celluloid negatives and transparencies they were responsible for, began to break down physically, and chemically beginning in the 70’s and 80’s.

Irrespective of fidelity, the photograph must still run the gambit of the human visual apparatus, only to further be warped by our psychological apparatus. A picture of a kitten for example, doing something particularly adorable, can inspire feelings of both delight and disgust. We can explain our reactions pretty easily, especially when the photo is a little less subjective; say a picture of children who have burned to death, or the Earth rising over the horizon of the moon.

So the lie is not the photograph its self but the cognitive gymnastics it forces upon our visually dominated minds (unless of course its not a particularly good picture).

And yet…

The person producing the image is well aware of this phenomenon, and if they are good, will manipulate it to varying success. But how?

Photography, and I will ask for a little patience from you, is about exposing film to light, causing a chemical reaction, or in the case of digital, exposing a sandwich of silicone to light. So a picture taker has only a few ways to control that light. Through shutter speed and aperture, or time and intensity respectively. The other is film ISO, or sensor ISO, which you can read about here. Really what this translates into is graininess of the image, which has a very subtle effect. If I were to take a picture of someone cleaning blood off a knife for instance, I would shoot that shit in black and white on 1600 ISO film to give it fucking baseball size grain, and add a sinister dimension to it that a very low grain film might not fully capture. Here, at least for me, that graininess is suggestive, but not overtly so.

The last thing, and I have saved it for last because it is the most important factor, is of course composition. Modern software has completely leveled the playing field. This has been true of just about every facet of life in the past 15 or so years. I have, for instance, gone over to a friends house with my laptop, a tiny Nikon D40x, and a USB cable, and while drinking a few beers, produced headshots for his upcoming feature in a poetry magazine. I spent an hour or so shooting, then maybe an hour or so processing to come up with shots like this:

My point being, that anyone can do this, but only in the past couple of years has a mobile studio really been possible. 10 years ago it would have taken days of hard work to end up with mediocre shit like this, and it would have been very expensive because it would have been film, requiring a darkroom, and all requisite materials. To bring it round to the larger point I want to make is that all the expensive equipment, software, and materials in the world cannot help a poorly composed image. An artist with a diposable camera can blow the doors right off some asshole doctor with a brand new Leica M9. Doctors have a particularly filthy reputation for paying asshole sums of money for top of the line equipment totally inappropriate to their skill level simply because they can, only to dump that equipment the very moment something new comes out.

Composition trumps all, which is why so many famous photographers started their careers in fine arts, whether painting or sculpture, or whatever. Their training in composition prepares them well for the medium of photography. They understand, and can successfully manipulate images by use of negative space, depth of field, and a lot of other shit too that slips my hungover brain. It is composition that perpetrates the lie of photography.

And the lie I speak of is the lie the observer tells themselves.

Have you ever picked a hotel room/apartment/restaurant/vacation spot/date because of a picture you saw, only to realize that what you got didn't match expectations? You can see what the picture captured, but somehow, it SEEMED different... "How did that happen?" you wonder to yourself.

Jerk.

Its a lousy discovery, how deceptive your own mind is, to you! To thine own self be true, unless you're looking at a photograph.