thoughts thunk

When discussing the movie Fahrenheit 9/11 with my sister today, debating the term “documentary” (I get the impression that this is happening a lot right now, although with my lack of television I’ve been out of the loop), my sister mentioned that she had recently read a list of suspicious elements in the Nick Berg beheading that was broadcast. After reading the list and subsequentially watching the footage, she found that she agreed with the “wrong” things that the article had listed. I have not seen the video, nor have I read the theories, but points of contention are whether Berg was already dead, the suspicious pudginess of the attackers–with the assumption that they should be skinnier, the presence of a wedding ring worn in the Western tradition on the left hand.

The most important and revealing part of our conversation, however, was on the unsureness of our media sources, and our active reading and questioning of visual images. As a future information professional, or whatever we are calling librarians these days, I at first questioned my sister on where she found this list of wrong things, planning on making a case for reputable news sources vs. some random conspiracy theorist’s writing. Perhaps it bodes ill for me professionally to find that not only did I not want to insult my sister’s ability to judge information for herself, but also I wondered how to judge these sources myself.

Photography, film and video (analog and digital) are deemed to be objective enough to be evidence, evidence of the existance of things, of people, of actions. The sense of the real that we get from photography began, I believe, with the natural contrast of the photomechanical process from the artist’s hand. The distance of the photographer from the photograph implies less intervention and manipulation–or at least it used to. The image spoke for itself to some extent: this is a building, this is a man. But when we wish to know more, we are largely dependent upon the accompanying captions. This is Cain killing Abel.

But all of us question the captions, and so we turn back to the image. And the whole process of endless interpretation begins again. Robert Capa’s 1936 photograph of a man shot in the Spanish civil war is a famous example of endless argument on real vs. staged–although it looks to be finally settled.

PROVING THAT ROBERT CAPA’S “FALLING SOLDIER” IS GENUINE: A DETECTIVE STORY