been quiet because dad in hospice
family trumps blogging at times like this
quote for the day
Love is not a feeling, it’s an ability.
life, business of
“Our business in life is not to succeed,
but to continue to fail in good spirits.”
Robert Louis Stevenson.
quoted by Tim O’Reilly
Seeing and not seeing
Daily Dose of Imagery is in my RSS reader.
I highly recommend tracking the photos displayed there.
thoughtful essay about photos
There is a curious entry in a blog about photos.
It begins:
By Errol Morris, blog for The New York Times, entry on July 10, 2007
Pictures are supposed to be worth a thousand words. But a picture unaccompanied by words may not mean anything at all. Do pictures provide evidence? And if so, evidence of what? And, of course, the underlying question: do they tell the truth?
I have beliefs about the photographs I see. Often – when they appear in books or newspapers – there are captions below them, or they are embedded in explanatory text. And even where there are no explicit captions on the page, there are captions in my mind. What I think I’m looking at. What I think the photograph is about.
I have often wondered: would it be possible to look at a photograph shorn of all its context, caption-less, unconnected to current thought and ideas? It would be like stumbling on a collection of photographs in a curiosity shop – pictures of people and places that we do not recognize and know nothing about. I might imagine things about the people and places in the photographs but know nothing about them. Nothing….
He continues a bit and then, “I want to ask a relatively simple question. Are these photographs true or false? Do they tell the truth?”
A very counter intuitive question.
But he telegraphs it a bit in the second paragraph (above).
He then proceeds to show how critical the caption, any text, gives context to the image.
Technically that’s known as metadata - data about data.
“A captionless photograph, stripped of all context, is virtually meaningless. I need to know more.”
But there is more to what he suggests.
“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. A caption is like a statement.”
And, as with any statement, the caption can lie.
“The idea that photographs hand us an objective piece of reality, that they by themselves provide us with the truth, is an idea that has been with us since the beginnings of photography. But photographs are neither true nor false in and of themselves. They are only true or false with respect to statements that we make about them or the questions that we might ask of them.”
I suggest you attempt to read the entry.
This entry is no more an objective piece of reality than the pictures he uses to great effect.
