Truth and Responsibility: The Photographer’s Relationship with Objectivity
By Francis Bartus
Posted 12/17/05
While vacationing in Belize with my girlfriend Rachel and her family, I took almost one hundred photographs of different subjects, on different days, in different locations. In order to create these images I used lenses, films, and filters. I used my considerable knowledge of photography to make images I considered beautiful. On one particular day, I recall trying to capture the brooding, dynamic nature of the stormy blue sky—a rare sight during the beautiful Belizean spring. We were spending the weekend in San Pedro, a tourist town that stretches along the shore of the Ambergis Caye. Piers, docks, ships, shells, and driftwood dotted the beach, and I wandered up and down for over an hour, exposing an entire roll of film. Upon returning home from the trip, I proudly displayed the photographs to Rachel, who agreed that they were beautiful, but held that the sky “never looked so blue; it was gray that day.” I was taken aback. She had contested the very quality of the sky that drew me to take photographs that day; each image I visualized through the viewfinder captured the sky’s saturation and contrast, and every slide testified accurately to my vision.
We argued back and forth over whether that stormy sky was really blue; after all, she only had her memory—I had the photos to prove it. But Rachel did not think the photos really proved anything; rather, she felt that they simply echoed my interpretation of the sky that day. Her memory of the sky contradicted both my memory and my photos. Our argument called into question what I believed to be the basic foundation of photography: a photograph merely reflects; it never interprets.
Yet our disagreement persisted in the back of my mind for months to come. I could not help but allow her skepticism to bother me—after all, she was practically accusing me of dishonesty. It was not long before I started to notice echoes of our dispute in my reading. I found that essayists, too, have struggled with the question of photographic evidence, and my reading led me to discover even more questions of responsibility, integrity, and interpretation. Perhaps I have not discovered a concrete solution to my problem, but through my reading, I have gained a better understanding of the broader issues that I wish to share.
It began with “In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life,” an essay on African-American representation penned by professor bell hooks. Wrestling with the idea of Black representation, hooks accuses both society in general and the Black Nationalist movement specifically of ignoring one of African-American’s most powerful assets in the fight for equality—photography. Throughout her essay, hooks points to photography as a crucial tool for Black liberation, contrasting the image of African-Americans endorsed by white society with the images individual African-Americans create of themselves and their peers daily through photographs. The stereotypical images produced by whites constitute the “social construction of black identity,” she claims, contributing to a “commodification of blackness (hooks 58).” She believes that these “conventional, even stereotypical” representations of African-Americans may “receive the greatest reward” from our society (hooks 58). Here, hooks rejects the idea of a photograph’s truth outright—arguing, like Rachel, that a photograph reflects the views and prejudices of the photographer. The dogmatic notion of photographic truth suffered yet another blow.
As I read more deeply into her essay, however, I found myself faced with a more nuanced view. During her introduction, hooks relates an anecdote similar to my own. She describes one of her favorite photos of her father, plainly clothed in a white t-shirt, smiling self-confidently in a pool hall. “In His Glory,” she calls it (hooks 54). Yet her sister sees the photo differently: “It’s disgusting,” her sister says, “He’s not even wearing a shirt, just an old white undershirt (hooks 55).” hooks acknowledges that the two of them see “the same man,” but not in the same way (hooks 55). “Our ‘reading’ and experience of this image is shaped by our relationship with him,” she claims (hooks 55). Here, hooks offers an appealing compromise; she acknowledges that both the viewer and the photographer exercise power over an image, but she has not yet indicated to what degree.
Later in her essay, she makes a rather bold statement that provides an answer to this question. Describing the power of photography for African-Americans, she writes that “The camera was the central instrument by which blacks could disprove representations of us created by white folks (hooks 59).” “Disprove?” Why not ‘counter’ or ‘contest?’ If one photograph has the power to disprove another, one photograph’s inherent truth must prove the other’s falsehood, and the power to misrepresent lies squarely in the hands of the photographer.
After all, perhaps I had misrepresented that stormy Belizean sky. After reading hook’s essay, I began to question the photographic choices I made that day. When I woke up that morning, I loaded my camera with the exact film that I thought would do justice to the subtle, overcast sky. The film, Fuji Velvia, has won favor among landscape photographers who appreciate its high contrast and saturated colors, which can exaggerate the subtle beauty in otherwise dreary landscapes. However, in many photography discussion groups, a small-scale controversy rages over the merits of shooting Velvia. Some landscape photographers live and die by the film, while others consider it disdainful—even dishonest.
Perhaps I was in the wrong—yet somehow, I could not reconcile the idea that photographs could “disprove” one another with the idea that a viewer could interpret the photo any way he pleased. It seemed that if the viewer had so much power over an image, the photographer’s input would become nearly irrelevant. But perhaps I was not asking the right question—I had acknowledged the interpretive power of the photographer, but still I wondered: who bears the moral responsibility for interpreting a photographed scene—the viewer, or the photographer?
To answer this question, I looked to Susan Sontag’s essay “Looking at War: Photography’s View of Devastation and Death,” an analysis of the photography’s moral view of war. In this essay, Sontag deals with many of the same issues tackled by hooks, but she examines the moral responsibilities of photographers and viewers in greater depth. At some points in the essay, Sontag seems to echo my early assumption that photographs reflect reality. “In contrast to a written account,” she claims, “which, depending on its complexity of thought, references and vocabulary, is pitched a larger or smaller readership, a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all (Sontag 86).” This statement hints at the notion of photographic objectivity. However, she does not actually believe that photographs reflect reality accurately and consistently. At the very least—she writes—they require the assistance of an honest caption. According to Sontag, the caption is essential to “the moral authority of the image (92).” “All photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions (Sontag 86),” she claims. To Sontag, the power to represent reality lies not with the photograph itself, but with the caption that accompanies it. Interestingly, she does not seem to point the finger directly at the viewer or the photographer, but rather, at whomever presents the photograph.
In order to fully understand her view, one must carefully examine her assumptions, the first of which absolves the viewer of the responsibility for misinterpreting a photograph. She believes, quite plainly, that “everyone is a literalist when it comes to photographs (Sontag 90).” Yet though she claims that all people interpret photos literally rather than artistically, she acknowledges that they do not necessarily interpret photos the same way—indeed, the meaning of a photo can depend even on the current political mood. Today, for example, she claims that “the pictures of wretched hollow-eyed G.I.s that once seemed subversive of militarism and imperialism may seem inspirational (Sontag 88).” In the wake of September 11th, their “revised subject” becomes “ordinary American young men doing their unpleasant, ennobling duty (Sontag 88).” Like hooks, Sontag acknowledges that a photo can be interpreted subjectively, but she does not hold the viewer responsible. If a viewer misinterprets the photo, she blames the caption—or lack thereof. But what of the photo itself? Why does the photographer not take the blame for a misleading photo?
Her answer betrays the true complexity of her argument. The caption, rather than the photograph, takes the blame, because—according to Sontag—no photo can possibly present the objective, undistorted reality. “To photograph is to frame,” she says, “and to frame is to exclude (Sontag 90).” A comforting notion, to be sure—especially for a photographer accused of misrepresenting the truth.
But Sontag does not wholly strip the responsibility from the photographer. When she examines the idea of photographic responsibility elsewhere in her essay, she comes away with a distinction between what she calls “photographers” and “photographer-witnesses (Sontag 94).” “Photographer-witnesses may try to make the spectacular not spectacular (Sontag 94),” she says. They resist the temptation “to transform,” which can make something “beautiful—or terrifying, or unbearable, or quite bearable—as it is not in real life (Sontag 94).” Here, Sontag claims that despite the inherent subjectivity of their medium, photographers can represent the truth with varying degrees of objectivity. Her argument implies that photographers have a responsibility to represent the truth, or at least the closest version they can recreate given their limited choices.
Yet Sontag’s argument is so nuanced that it loses its consistency. After all, she leaves her controversial distinction between photographers and photographer-witnesses dangling at the end of a paragraph, undefended. It seems strange for her to adhere to the idea that photographers can selectively decide to present their information with varying degrees of objectivity when she herself acknowledges that “to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude (Sontag 94).” Even the content that lies within the frame is subject to a myriad of choices: what film will best capture the photographer’s vision of the truth: a bright, peppy, color film—or grainy, gritty black-and-white? Which lens should be chosen—a telephoto lens that provides a distant, compressed view of a narrow subject, or a wide-angle, which exaggerates the foreground subjects while de-emphasizing the background? An experienced photographer may argue that no amount of honesty or integrity will eliminate the necessity to make these creative—often artistic—photographic choices upon taking every single picture.
Yet I should not allow Sontag’s inconsistency to drown out her entire argument. After all, she reaches a valuable compromise between the photographer and the viewer, allowing that the photographer has much power over the final image and pointing out that with power comes responsibility. Perhaps I should not have blamed Rachel for remembering the day the way she did—after all, she is entitled to her own subjective interpretation of the photos, and even Sontag would forgive me for failing to meet her expectations.
As I reflected on both hooks and Sontag, I realized that neither author had made her peace with photographic subjectivity, and neither had I. Where is the line between the objective and the subjective? Sontag seems to be satisfied as long as photographer’s attempt the objective, and hooks is satisfied with subjectivity, but I wanted something more concrete.
What I found was not what I expected. My frustrated search sent me to a seemingly unrelated essay called “Indians: Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History,” written by historian Jane Tompkins. In her essay, Tompkins wrestles with a similar problem as she moves from one historical text to another, vainly searching for a consistent account of a single historical event. Again and again, she is frustrated to discover that the individual author’s perspectives—even those of primary sources—have muddied the historical “facts.” Much like myself after reading hooks and Sontag, she is forced to acknowledge the subjectivity of documentation, but she must discover for herself how to reconcile it with the crucial notion that they can still somehow reflect the truth. Unlike Sontag or hooks, she deals with this problem directly and fully. At the end of her essay, after much restless searching, she finally makes her peace with subjectivity, saying that “you can’t argue that someone else’s facts are not facts because they are only the product of a perspective, since this will be true of the facts that you perceive as well (Tompkins 118).” Here, she neatly ties up both loose ends of the preceding arguments. Though each and every photograph is inevitably the product of photographer’s perspective, one need not argue that they are not objective enough, for what the viewer perceives of the photograph (indeed, what the viewer would have perceived of the actual event had the viewer witnessed it firsthand) is a product of a perspective as well. Thus, photographs can be pieced together to form a cohesive narrative, as Tompkins says. One might believe one up to a point, one not at all, and another almost entirely, “according to what seems reasonable and plausible (Tompkins 118).”
With this, I, too, have finally found my peace. Though I began certain that photographs were objective representations of reality, hooks taught me that photographs all are the product of a perspective; Sontag added that even so, a photograph can—and should—attempt objectivity, and Tompkins helped me salvage the potential for photographic truth-telling from the forces of subjectivity and the threat of relativism.
Yet the issues at stake are far larger than a silly argument over a mere vacation. For today’s society relies on countless images in the news media to represent the essence of countless world events. The photos created by photojournalists have the power to define public perceptions of crucial issues. In some cases, one might make a moral judgment based solely on the content of a photograph. Yet perhaps we, too, can make our peace with the threat of photographic subjectivity. From now on, perhaps we should realize that like editorials, news articles, and television journalism, photographs, too, inevitably reflect the perspective of their creator. Yet though photos deserve to face the same critical scrutiny from the public, they can still communicate valuable information about an event. They must be seen as interpretations—windows into an objective truth, to be taken with a grain of salt—but not deemed “too artistic” simply because they are beautiful.
Works Cited
hooks, bell. “In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life.” Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. New York: The New Press. 54-64.
Sontag, Susan. “Looking at War: Photography’s View of Devastation and Death.” The New Yorker. 9 Dec. 2002: 82-98.
Tompkins, Jane. “Indians: Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History.” Critical Inquiry 13.1 (1986): 101-119.