Review by New York Times Review
One of the first things we learn in "Believing Is Seeing" is that its author, the filmmaker Errol Morris, has limited sight in one eye and lacks normal stereoscopic vision - "My fault," he writes, for refusing to wear an eye patch after being treated for strabismus in childhood. It's hard to think of another writer who so neatly embodies the theme of his own book. "Believing Is Seeing" is about the limitations of vision, and about the inevitable idiosyncrasies and distortions involved in the act of looking - in particular, looking at photographs. Or anyway, it's sort of about that. Reading it, I thought of Morris's first film, "Gates of Heaven," which is ostensibly about pet cemeteries and includes more material on pet cemeteries than any other movie ever made (including "Pet Sematary") but is, nonetheless, not really about pet cemeteries at all. Likewise, "Believing Is Seeing," though perceptive about photography, is fundamentally concerned with something very different: epistemology. Morris is chiefly interested in the nature of knowledge, in figuring out where the truth - in both senses - lies. As that suggests, Morris believes in objective truth, and believes that people can grasp it - "even though," as he has written elsewhere, "the world is unutterably insane." The question then becomes how to coax an insane world into yielding up its truths, and "Believing Is Seeing" amounts to a provisional, pastiche-y, deeply interesting attempt at an answer. Each of its six chapters originally appeared, in different form, in the Opinionator blog of The New York Times, and each centers on a photo or photo set: two slightly different pictures taken by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War; the infamous Abu Ghraib images, over two chapters; Depressionera photographs by Walker Evans and Arthur Rothstein; pictures of children's toys lying in the rubble after Israeli airstrikes on southern Lebanon in 2006; and an ambrotype of three young children that was found clutched in the hand of a dead Union soldier at Gettysburg in 1863. The first of these chapters, on Roger Fenton, is a template, stylistically and thematically, for everything that follows. Taken in 1855, the two Fenton photographs show an empty stretch of road in a heavily shelled valley near Sebastopol. In one, cannonballs are scattered in ditches beside the road; in the other, they are also strewn along the road itself. Morris's interest in these images was piqued by Susan Sontag, herself the author of two books on photography. According to Morris, Sontag claims that Fenton moved the cannonballs onto the road to create a more dramatic image. He is puzzled by this allegation (How does she know that Fenton staged the second photograph? How does she even know in what order the photographs were taken?), and irked by her opprobrium. "Even if Sontag is right, namely, that Fenton moved the cannonballs to telegraph the horrors of war, what's so bad about that?" he asks. "Why does moralizing about 'posing' take precedence . . . over moralizing about the carnage of war?" Morris himself has paid a price for "posing." In 1989, he was passed over for an Oscar nomination for "The Thin Blue Line" (1988), reportedly because his use of staged re-creations violated the Academy's standards for documentary films. (In 2004, he finally won his Oscar, for "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara." Lesson 7: "Belief and Seeing Are Both Often Wrong") Morris not only defends the use of such staging techniques, but also suggests that we can never wholly avoid them. An elephant might have been standing on that road in Crimea, he points out, and Fenton could have waited until it passed out of the frame to take his pictures. In that case, Morris writes, "he posed the photograph by excluding something. . . . But how would you know? . . . Isn't there always a possible elephant lurking just at the edge of the frame?" Morris eventually solves the mystery of which Fenton photograph came first - and, as with all satisfying mysteries, the solution is beautifully obvious once you know it. The road to that solution, by contrast, is so subtle, elliptical and exhaustive that it lies just to the pleasurable side of tedium. Morris is one of the few prose writers to whom the adjective "repetitive" can be applied non-pejoratively. His repetition - and there is a lot of it - is procedural: he is testing, falsifying, eliminating possibilities. Like the music of Philip Glass (who scored several Morris films) and the murder scene in "The Thin Blue Line" (which is re-enacted over and over with minute changes), the essays in "Believing Is Seeing" are structured as a kind of theme-and-variation. We first encounter this approach during Morris's tortuous voyage through Crimea. But when he moves on to Abu Ghraib, it suddenly makes a different kind of sense. It turns out that Morris has been instructing us in a method: getting us accustomed, on the benign turf of the past, to "thinking about some of the most vexing issues in photography - about posing, about the intentions of the photographer, about the nature of photographic evidence - about the relationship between photographs and reality." WHEN you ask these questions in the context of Abu Ghraib, both their stakes and their complexity become immediately apparent. Unlike the Crimea mystery, this one will not culminate in an airtight and satisfying solution; indeed, we will not encounter any more such solutions in this book. Instead, "Believing Is Seeing" reveals itself as really (albeit implicitly) about how it feels to sustain the search for truth in an infinitely complicated world. It is, itself, a kind of staged re-creation: of the battle between the Errol Morris who believes in irrefutable conclusions (and in the ethics and efficacy of his own particular means of arriving at them), and the Errol Morris who possesses a deeply personal understanding that the truth very often evades us. It is impossible to read "Believing Is Seeing" without the word "obsessive" coming to mind. Happily, this thematic narrowness is counterbalanced by a stylistic tendency in the opposite direction - namely, toward the tangential and panoptic. The combined effect is weird and mesmerizing, like a blizzard falling on a single house. We are talking about a book that includes, among other things, maps, letters, timelines, family trees, old advertisements, military flowcharts and excerpts from interviews, all intercut with Morris's own writing. (This last shows moments of flair, as when he compares Gorbachev's estate to "a metastatic International House of Pancakes." Mostly, though, Morris is plainspoken, and that style serves him well: he is matter-of-fact about matters of fact.) And, of course, "Believing Is Seeing" includes photographs, many of which relate only obliquely to the text. In this respect, Morris's book feels less like traditional photography criticism than like the novels of W.G. Sebald, which are similarly obsessed with truth, memory and war. We get odd, absorbing pictures of Mayan ruins, of Picasso and his mistress, of the high heels worn by Morris's tour guide in Crimea: shanks, shoes, a shadow (presumably the photographer's) falling across the once boot-trodden road. Like extra problem sets in a textbook, these photos offer us additional opportunities to practice the art of looking, while simultaneously multiplying the scale of, as Morris's subtitle puts it, "the mysteries of photography." And "mystery" is the operative word. Before his filmmaking career took off, Morris had a day job as a detective, and he urges us, here, to read his essays "as a collection of mystery stories." That's easy advice to follow. As the de facto protagonist of his own book, Morris reminds me of no one so much as Sherlock Holmes, for whom private investigation was a form of practical epistemology. Like Holmes, Morris believes that truth can be revealed by impartially attending to details overlooked or misinterpreted by others. Like Holmes, he is patient, compulsive and unafraid of legwork. Of the Fenton photographs, he writes: "My hunch was that the lighting and shadows on the cannonballs might be the key to ordering" the images. "I wanted to experiment with lighting the cannonballs from various directions, replicating the directions of the sun and time of day. But first I needed an 1850s cannonball." Off he goes to find one. But if "Believing Is Seeing" is a collection of detective stories, there is even more mystery at hand than Morris lets on. Take, for instance, his showdown with Sontag. As it happens, she never claimed that Fenton "moved the cannonballs to telegraph the horrors of war." On the contrary: in "Regarding the Pain of Others" (2004), she disparages Fenton as a stooge of the British government, sent to Crimea "to give another, more positive impression of the increasingly unpopular war." Indeed, of all Fenton's pictures, Sontag likes the ones of the road to Sebastopol best; in these, she says, he finally "reaches beyond benign documentation." She does note that Fenton moved the cannonballs onto the road (a claim Morris's investigation confirms) - but she is neither more outraged nor less thoughtful about this than Morris. The technologies and conventions of the time all but mandated such staging, and anyway, "with time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind." Morris's mistaken claim about Sontag would be little more than a fact-checker's quibble, except that it illuminates a central fault line in his work. Fact-checking is, after all, what Morris champions here. To unearth the truth, he argues, we must avoid making psychological inferences and taking ideological stands; only facts should command our attention. But no one other than the fictional Holmes possesses such a dispassionate (not to say impoverished) perspective on life, and very few people believe, these days, that facts can be plucked so cleanly from the human context. Certainly "Believing Is Seeing" is far from ideologically neutral. Its implicit commitments are suggested by the standoff with Sontag, and also by the fact - unacknowledged by Morris - that all of its central photographs are profoundly political. Indeed, with one exception, they are all wartime images. There's a reason this book contains little or no discussion of commercial photography, fashion photography, photography as art, soon-to-be-regretted yearbook photos or iPhone snapshots. Given Morris's real (if unstated) interests, these are elephants outside the frame. HERE, then, is a mystery of a different order. Call it "Observations on the Mysteries of Errol Morris." Whatever else he is doing, Morris is working out his own relationship to the documentary project, including to its other practitioners and critics. Reportedly, his next two books will look at the philosopher Thomas Kuhn, whose skepticism for scientific truth Morris abhors, and Janet Malcolm, for years the photography critic at The New Yorker and later the author of "The Journalist and the Murderer," a book about the factually, ethically and legally troubled relationship between a reporter and a convicted killer. Knowing this, I can't help wondering if "Believing Is Seeing" is the first installment in a three-volume attempt to make sense of the relationship between the documentarian, the documented and the truth. I hope so. For Morris, the truth is (as they say) out there; the question is how to pick our way in its direction. There is no mechanical means of doing so, he argues; the camera is never wholly obscura or lucida. Perhaps this is why Morris's book feels so human. It combines the hubris of his ends - the desire, shared by approximately all of us, to lay claim to the truth - with the humility of his means. In "Believing Is Seeing," Morris explores and refines our most basic way of understanding the world, which is also a plea for attention, an invitation to communal experience, an expression of urgency, an exclamation of wonder and one of our first, most important and most enduring requests of each other: Look! With photographs, Morris asks, isn't there always a possible elephant lurking just outside the frame? Crimea, 1855: Which is "true"? A road with cannonballs, or without? Kathryn Schulz is the author of "Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 4, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Morris (The Fog of War, 2003; Tabloid, 2010) reflectively asks. Had I allowed my beliefs to determine what I saw? Had I, too, fallen victim to the principle, believing is seeing. Photographs, like appearances, he observes, are deceiving and can lead to erroneous and damaging assumptions. To explore this predicament, he marshals his prodigious curiosity, rigor, and convictions in a series of exacting investigations into the veracity of journalistic photography, especially during war, energetically combining lively and personable narration, nervy interviews, and indelible images. The first case involves two Crimean War battlefield photographs taken by Roger Fenton that are identical except for the placement of the cannonballs, raising the book's central concerns regarding authenticity and th. posin. of documentary photographs, the photographer's intention, and the photograph's perceived meaning. These questions escalate exponentially in Morris' bold and brilliant analysis of the shocking photographs of Abu Ghraib. Other mysteries involve 1930s Farm Security Administration photographs by Arthur Rothstein and Walker Evans and a photograph of three children found in the hand of a dead, unidentified Union soldier at Gettysburg. Morris' assiduous and profound inquiry into the relationship between reality and photography is eye-opening, mind-expanding, and essential in this age of ubiquitous digital images.--Seaman, Donn. Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Morris (Fog of War) offers a collection of fascinating investigative essays on documentary photography and its relation to reality. Arguing that photographs conceal as much as they reveal, Morris revisits historical but still passionately alive controversies (like accusations of photographers working for the Depression-era Farm Security Administration staging scenes) as well as contemporary ones (newswire photos of children's toys, for instance, shot among the rubble of Israel-bombed southern Lebanon). Indeed, one chapter expands on the filmmaker's own Standard Operating Procedure (2008), a documentary examining the Abu Ghraib scandal through an interrogation of its now iconic photographs. Morris begins with a brilliant opening chapter-a template and touchstone for what follows, a case study in the history of documentary photography: Roger Fenton's two 1855 images of The Valley of the Shadow of Death, a road near the front lines of the Crimean War. The gripping account tacitly puts Morris-as well as his various assistants and interlocutors-in the plot of a detective novel, with the author a kind of Hercule Poirot of the photographic world. While not covering new ground everywhere he goes-although his literal retracing of old ground in the case of The Valley of the Shadow of Death leads to surprising revelations-Morris brings an insatiable and contagious curiosity throughout to the convolutions that arise between art and truth telling. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Oscar-winning filmmaker (The Fog of War) Morris investigates well-known images to examine the nature of truth in photography. He chooses images from four different wars (the Crimean War, the Civil War, the Iraq War, and the Israeli-Lebanese war) as well as photographs from the Farm Service Administration and the Works Progress Administration taken during and after the Great Depression. He approaches each photographic mystery as a forensic scientist would, performing exhaustive research, consulting historical and scientific experts, traveling to the sites where the photographs were made, and conducting experiments with exposure and lighting. What Morris reveals is that regardless of an image's historical data or metadata, inherently complex theoretical issues of intention, concealment, and revelation will always exist. VERDICT Although the research is serious, extremely thorough, and extensively detailed, Morris's writing style is accessible and enjoyable. Originally published as individual essays in the New York Times, this book is destined to become a classic in photo theory. Recommended for undergraduate and graduate photography and art history collections. [See Prepub Alert, 11/29/10.]-Shauna Frischkorn, Millersville Univ., PA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Master documentarian Morris serves up an erudite, sometimes recondite examination of the power of photographs to conceal as much as they reveal.The author, known for films such asThe Thin Blue LineandThe Fog of War, is a truth-teller, skilled at using filmic and photographic evidence to reveal truth and innocence. Here he interrogates the truthor notof images iconic and scarcely known, beginning with a long and sometimes dauntingly technical disquisition on a brace of photographs taken in the Crimean War following the vaunted Charge of the Light Brigade. In one image, cannonballs lie neatly arranged along the side of the road along which the attack occurred; in another, the cannonballs are strewn about as if they had fallen there. Did the British photographer move the cannonballs to heighten the drama of the image, or did British engineers clean up the road so that equipment could pass? In other words, which image came first? Doggedly, Morris traveled to Crimea to find the site and puzzle over the position of the sun to answer those questions. The cross-examination is leisurely, methodical, sometimes even plodding, but there's a purpose to the slow establishment of forensic fact, since Morris then moves on to more recentand certainly controversialphotographs taken at Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Readers will remember the smiling thumbs-up over corpses, the damaged fellow standing wired as if ready to be crucified. So does Morris, who insists, "The photographs are the start of a trail of evidence, butnotthe end...We shouldn't allow what happened at Abu Ghraib to disappear except for a smile." Along the way, the author gets in a few digs at theoreticians of photography, taking genteel issue with the arid Susan Sontag/Roland Barthes school of interpretation. But mostly he sticks to what he sees before him, and not on what others have seen and said.Students of photographyand fans ofCSIwill find this a provocative, memorable book.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
