This morning I was reminded of a video I have used in junior and senior history classes to introduce the idea of 'perspective' in photographs and thought that I would share it here.
In this 'decoy' set up by Canon Australia, the tech company, five photographers were asked to shoot portraits of the same model. The catch was that each photographer was told a very different story about who the model was. According to their final images, this demonstrably shaped the way they tried to 'capture' the model in their photographs.
In the very least, it is an interesting example of how the beliefs, perceptions and intentions of a photographer will change what they look for and what they end up selecting as representative of a person. That could easily be extended to the way photographers represent historical events too.
This video has made a great discussion starter for me in history classes and also when exploring strategies for teaching about historical sources in History Method classes at university.
The great photographer and commentator Susan Sontag put it in more complex terms in the opening pages of On Photography (originally published in 1977) when she wrote:
Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it... A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that something happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph - any photograph - seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects... But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to that usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. [1]
What does all this suggest about about the nature of photographs as historical evidence? That who is behind the camera matters as much as what is in front of the camera. That photographs are never simply 'recording the truth' but always making commentary. That we must learn to 'read' photographs as much as any other fragment of the past and present.
Endnotes
[1] Susan Sontag, On Photography, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1979, pp. 5 – 6