Errol Morris – Literature Review

This literature review of Errol Morris's New York Time blog, Zoom, is one of three. I will be looking at entries from July 2007 through October 2007.

In his first blog entry with the New York Times, “Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire,” Errol Morris opens with a line of skepticism running throughout Zoom: “Pictures are supposed to be worth a thousand words.”[1] It is the first instance in which Morris takes up an everyday cliché and brings the reader to pause upon it. The technique resonates with the act of photography itself—a methodical dissection of an environment to make what appears, at first, banal, challenging and provocative.

In the following entries, Morris engages the reader not with a crash-course in the aesthetics of the photograph—its framing or lighting of a scene—but rather, calls into question the implications of relying upon aesthetics. The frame may capture an engrossing image, but what truth does it leave out in the act of framing? The contrast between black cannonballs and a sun-bleached road may be strikingly beautiful, but isn't there truth in the strategic posing of that scene as well? What about the content that the image excludes—in focusing on this slice of time, are we focusing on a truth or looking right past one? The context in which artistic expression takes hold is critical for gleaning meaning from a photograph; context creates truth in photography. This is not an entirely surprising position for Morris, who is in “the business” of moving pictures, to take:

In discussing truth and photography, we are asking whether a caption or a belief - whether a statement about a photograph — is true or false about (the things depicted in) the photograph. [...] The issue of the truth or falsity of a photograph is only meaningful with respect to statements about the photograph. Truth or falsity “adheres” not to the photograph itself but to the statements we make about a photograph. Depending on the statements, our answers change. All alone — shorn of context, without captions — a photograph is neither true nor false.[2]

The truths Morris takes from photographs of his youth relate directly back to memories he has—the context out of which his present arises, perhaps. He may remember, as a child, playing a game against the wall upon which he is seated in one of the photographs; he may remember the day on which he received the bicycle which sneaks into the frame on another picture. These memories verify the meaning behind the photographs: they are photographs of Errol Morris the filmmaker, and Errol Morris was a boy at a time in the past. Additionally, the context in which Morris received the photographs is indicative of the truth behind them; they hold value, as they are shots taken by his father, fifty years after the man's death. With the multiplicity of contexts surrounding the image, numerous truths emerge, as the photographs are equally Errol Morris and the relationship between father and son.

To better understand why a photograph without context does not have meaning, we may consider Morris's consideration of photographs as data: “Photographs preserve information. They record data. They present evidence.”[3] In this instance, the filmmaker has stripped the photograph of all aesthetic sensibility and reduced it to a means to an end (that end being the truth(s) which the photograph lends itself to). The photograph of Errol Morris sitting on a brick wall as a boy has no inherent truth, it is simply evidence of a statement or question which has been formulated through contextualization in the viewer's mind (e.g. Morris contextualized the image relative to his past; the reader will contextualize it differently). The reader absorbs the language of the article on the website to contextualize the photograph before him (e.g. I, the reader, am reading an article written by Errol Morris, and so I contextualize the image as the boy, Errol Morris). The relationship between language and the world holds the truth Morris notes,[4] and the image is merely present to corroborate the language (unless the image is intentionally deceptive—this is the concern of Sontag and others in their consideration of Fenton's “Valley of the Shadow of Death.”)

The example of multiple truths can be extended to the images that Morris includes in his entries. The Lusitania, a ship which predates the first World War, has a historical context written into our texts. It is dry and factual—more data. For those of us who were not alive when the Lusitania sunk, this historical context is largely all we have in pursuing the truth of the image of the Lusitania. My guess would be that many of us view the truth of the photograph similarly: that was the ship that brought the United States into WWI; it was a large ship and could hold 1,000 people (per the caption). The context for the event is provided in writing and in other images which Morris provides for us, all of which are meant to make the initial image of the ocean-liner more truthful. To an extent, the filmmaker and the photographs succeed. After viewing the New York Times image of the coffins, conceptualizing the loss of life in viewing the original photograph becomes easier. The role of sequence becomes critical in contextualization, as the coffins only hold resonance in so far as they correlate to the original image (the ship); naturally, this correlation is dependent upon the coffin image dating after the photograph of the Lusitania chugging along.

As we find out in Morris's later entries, the filmmaker obsesses over the sequence of images. He does so because the sequence lends itself to the truth behind that data (the photographs). Roger Fenton's photos of “Valley of the Shadow of Death” speak to the photographer's personality, and Morris's project determining which comes first—OFF or ON—has little to do with the aestheticism of the photographs and everything to do with assessing the truth of who Roger Fenton was. The “Which Came First” entries depict one image producer trying to understand another, and the truth of Fenton's photographs revolve around the ethical implications of posing, for Morris. The caption under the photographs is not simply: “Valley of the Shadow of Death,” but also “Roger Fenton poses the ON Scene.” Both are “truths” which the photographs verify.

This distinction between a photograph as the truth and a photograph as evidence of the truth is emphasized in Morris's description of the photograph as a simulacrum: “[...] photographs are nothing more than coarse-grained screens laid over reality, revealing nothing more (about what is photographed) than a certain size. They provide an imperfect simulacrum of the surface of things.”[5] If one takes Morris's point to be valid, the sequence of images forms its own language which can complement the images themselves. Perhaps many imperfect simulacra find coherence in an order that lends itself to truth. The possibility arguably makes film, if not a more truthful medium, a medium providing more pathways to the truth. As Morris notes, “In every photograph something is absent. Someone has made a decision about what time-slice to expose on the emulsion, what space-slice to expose on the emulsion.” That being the case, the same can be said for film—something is always out of the frame, always missed just before the lens opens and after it shutters closed.

Moving forward, one might apply Morris's observations regarding the context in which representations emerge to our production efforts. In particular, I wonder what the filmmaker's insights offer in the realm of documentation. Documentation suggests that the medium acts to represent a truth evolving before us; theoretically, we are not producing that truth, we are capturing the data to corroborate it. Clearly, this is not the case.

How can the act of gathering (photographic) data be possible? When Morris suggests that “believing is seeing,” he notes the difficulty, if not impossibility, of objectivity. This should not be considered only in the realm of consumption, but in production as well. The photographer begins a communication with the subject of his photograph, and the photograph itself is data produced not as a documentation of what is as it is, but of the truth as it is found by the producer (It is interesting to note that only when Errol Morris and Dennis Purcell look outside the truth which Fenton sought to capture do they derive meaning (some semblance of truth) from the movement of the seemingly inconsequential rocks slipping down the slope of the valley).

A possible solution to this predicament may be found in Part II of Morris's “Which Came First” series. He closes the entry with an abrupt transition: “One last thought. I imagine a counterpart to Fenton.”[6] Morris offers no explanation for the shift, but it is instructive. Another producer is introduced. Tolstoy's truth enters the dialogue. Perhaps where Fenton's and Tolstoy's truths overlap, and where we the readers too find the truths we have been looking for—perhaps that is where meaning resides. If that is the case, we need as many images of the Valley of the Shadow of Death as we can produce, and we need them from as many contexts as possible.

Notes
[1] Errol Morris, “Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire,” New York Times 10 Jul. 2007. http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/pictures-are-supposed-to-be-worth-a-thousand-words/
[2] Errol Morris, “Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire,” New York Times 10 Jul. 2007. http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/pictures-are-supposed-to-be-worth-a-thousand-words/
[3] Errol Morris, “Which Came First? (Part Three): Can George, Lionel and Marmaduke Help Us Order the Fenton Photographs?” New York Times 23 Oct. 2007. http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/which-came-first-part-three-can-george-lionel-and-marmaduke-help-us-order-the-fenton-photographs/
[4] Errol Morris, “Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire,” New York Times 10 Jul. 2007. http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/pictures-are-supposed-to-be-worth-a-thousand-words/
[5] Errol Morris, “Will the Real Hooded Man Please Stand Up” New York Times 15 Aug. 2007. http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/15/will-the-real-hooded-man-please-stand-up/
[6] Errol Morris, “Which Came First? (Part Two)” New York Times 4 Oct. 2007. http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/which-came-first-part-two/