A short note on a deep topic about photography, objectivity and interpretation.

Sliver, St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, England

Jörg Colberg, The inside vs. the outside view:

A recent series of photographs depicting the Polish city of Krakow by Supanit Riansrivilai, who was born in Thailand and lives in France, caused a bit of a kerfuffle over at The Black Snapper. Much to their credit, the Black Snapper folks made this the topic of a post.

The Black Snapper folks elevated the comments into a real discussion, How is Central Europe to be perceived in contemporary photography? From a comment by Kolouker:

She [Supanit] ’saw’ what she expected to see, and overlooked everything that did not fit in her assumed image of Poland. Since one’s cultural background (and language) determines the way one perceives the world, people are often unable to understand what they see when they are among people of different culture, in a different climate etc.

… Another important thing in my opinion is the fact Supanit treats street photography as an objective source of information. This is a very dangerous approach. She uses a number of unconnected street snaps, and shoehorns them into the context of that post communist depression. This is plainly wrong as you can not portray a nation by taking pictures of people in the streets. One could illustrate depression, happiness, etc using street photographs. But whatever the subject is it will show only a partial view.

Back to Jörg:

This is the old problem with insiders seeing other things than outsiders: If you visit a country, your perception of that country will depend on your own cultural background, which could be very different. If you live in that country you will inevitably notice different things – and seeing a foreigner show things that you might consider to be unflattering only adds to your discomfort. So unlike the Black Snapper folks I don’t see the problem necessarily in how Central Europe is perceived (even though this might play a minor role), and I also don’t see it as a question of photographic style. Instead, the main issue seems to be that there simply is no realistic versus an unrealistic or a true versus a false depiction of Central Europe or any other place. A photographer will see things based on his or her background, and while we can disagree with it and claim that “no, that’s not a good depiction of this place”, it still doesn’t automatically mean that that photographer’s view is less valid than ours.

Agreed. But why?

Timothy Carmody in Snarkmarket.com‘s New Liberal Arts:

Photography is the art and science of the real, but also of the fake; of the depth and the surface, and the authentic as well as the inauthentic or nonauthentic appearances of the world.

Yes. But how?

Jeff Share, The Camera Always Lies, Breaking the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity:

Photographs are never objective. Think about it. The very nature of photography – the instantaneous capture of images recorded by light reflected onto film – creates the illusion that a photograph is an objective document.

… The belief that “the camera never lies” betrays the fact that someone chose what, when, where, why, and how to photograph. Every step a photographer makes in taking a picture involves subjective choices, from the camera angle (looking up, looking down, eye level) to the framing (what to include and what to leave out) to the moment of exposure (when to shoot and when to wait). A photograph is always a decontextualized representation of reality recorded by a human being who makes conscious and even unconscious choices based on his or her cultural upbringing, experiences and biases. Joan Fontcuberta, editor of the Spanish magazine PhotoVision, insists that the phrase “manipulated photography” is a redundancy, since every photograph is manipulated.

To add to the point, despite what David Hockney has said, photographs have told lies far before digital manipulation was possible; Joel Sternfeld, in a 2004 interview with the Guardian (link via Rob Gardiner):

Photography has always been capable of manipulation… Even more subtle and more invidious is the fact that any time you put a frame to the world, it’s an interpretation.

… No individual photo explains anything. That’s what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium. It is the photographer’s job to get this medium to say what you need it to say. Because photography has a certain verisimilitude, it has gained a currency as truthful – but photographs have always been convincing lies.

Photographs tell lies independent of a photographer’s intent, a function of the disconnect between creation and interpretation, the distance between points of view, aided by information and knowledge asymmetries and the transaction costs of context.

Lies told through slivers of reality; constricted frames of view and snippets of time: the beauty and the beast of photography wrapped up together.

Why?

To start, the inescapable: wherever we go, we always bring ourselves.

Any photographer knows that there is a world outside the frame and the moment; any traveler instinctually understands that a fellow traveler’s perception of a place says more about the traveler than the place; any writer knows that comments and reviews say more about the commenter then the post itself; all of us naturally listen to people with one ear on the message and half a mind on their potential biases.

Bias is inescapable. But despite common wisdom, transparency isn’t the solution; interpretation isn’t easy, creating and delivering context and relevance is expensive and difficult to scale.

How do we move forward?

Embrace lies as slivers of reality, ready to be pieced together to tell cohesive stories.

Fundamentally, this is why we care about how we use the Internet to aggregate, filter, search, rank, validate and distribute content and context on the web, an attempt to re-create the algorithms, stereotypes and heuristics we created to help us structure and understand our offline worlds.

Given time, we’ll develop similar tools and methods for sorting through our online world. Just give it some time.