"Verity" in art is a bad thing?

[peterm1]

I have often wondered about the idea of "truth" or "verity" in art. The only sense in which its true that verity is important is in the sense that a piece of art has to "speak" to the viewer / person engaging with it. If a piece of art (be it a photo a painting or something else) does not engage the interest and emotions of the viewer then the art does not work in my view - it has no emotional engagement. I think that this is the sense in which people often use the term truth or verity.

The odd thing is that this does not mean an image for example has to be an accurate representation of the physical appearance of the subject. This is what impressionists and abstract artists have found. By painting a picture which does not simply portray the subject its possible to create an image that is somehow MORE truthful than a simple representational image. ie if done well it can convey an inner truth about the subject that otherwise is hidden.

Anyway that's what I think and this is the reason why many of my images are not just photos of things or people - I often try to play with lighting or distortion to make the image somehow convey more than just an impression of how the subject looks.

 

[telenous]

Photographs are not suitable candidates for being true or false. Contrasting them with e.g. sentences, which are often thought to be good examples of what can be true or false, brings to the fore the limitations of photographs. They are semantically imprecise, syntactically barren, and, to compound matters, they come with a mere indexical function that is blind to anything non-spatiotemporal, non-concrete and not in the present tense (at least at the time of making the photo). Photographers of a theoretical bend have worked at ways to alleviate these limitations, but that's something requiring imaginative work on their part. So, being a stickler about the use of these terms, and insofar as it is also accepted that their technical sense originates in logic/maths/philosophy, photographs cannot be called true (or false, for that matter).

For this reason, I think it is more fruitful to understand artistic discussions of truth, or verity in photography in a much looser way, as a means to broach the subject of literalness (mentioned earlier) or accuracy of description and representation. To amplify a bit on Hilliard's example, and some of the very interesting things RichC said about it, the photos themselves do not really contradict each other. All they show are certain objects laid down in certain ways, while every change of frame introduces new objects around the focal one (the body). But if there is an actual causal connection between any one of them, or all of them, and the body, well, that is something that cannot be depicted, and actually may be forever inaccessible to us. (Causality is notoriously naughty like that, it cannot be shown, but merely induced or theorized). On the other hand, the conclusions we (may) infer, based upon what the photographs are showing, do contradict each other (there's usually just one cause of death for each one of us), though to arrive at these conclusions one has also to depend on their visual sophistication as a viewer. First, we have to understand the visual conventions that govern photographs, a business that is of a cognitive and cultural nature. Certain assumptions about the uses of photography also have to be made, as well as a broader one about the fact that a work of art is fundamentally a gesture of some kind of communication, even if just of a reflexive kind. These assumptions are so basic as to seem trivial, yet without them one is guaranteed to arrive at conclusions one would normally expect from the visually uninitiated (an example may be an alien who visits for the first time earth and looks at photographs) or the intentionally/unintentionally sophomoric. Because we 're usually not like that, we ultimately arrive at the captions provided with Hilliard's photos. But that's an extra step, one we are taking creatively, on top of what the photographs show. Photographs are silent witnesses, they may point to this and that, but they can't declare their subject unequivocally. It is us who do this, in an effort for some kind of solace of meaning.

PS: Thumbnail with an alternative to Hilliard's, non-photographic example, of how framing influences the decoding of an image.

 

[RichC]

↑ What Telenous said!

 

[Margu]

Photographs are not suitable candidates for being true or false.

if that was the case photographs would not be acceptable in official documents such as passports etc.

photography is describing reality

 

[tunalegs]

Art School Twaddle. She'll grow out of it, hopefully.

Any show of visual art that has to have an explanation attached to the work itself is, IMO, deficient. The work either works, or it doesn't, and thats a function of its aesthetics, both as singular works and as a body of work. Explanation just needlessly circumscribes the potential effect of the work.

Plus, I've never met a really good visual artist who had any real idea about what the work meant. The best answer, when asked, "what does it mean?" is usually to point at it and say "It means that."

Any artist who doesn't know what they're trying to do isn't a good artist.

 

[RichC]

if that was the case photographs would not be acceptable in official documents such as passports etc.

photography is describing reality

Rubbish! Read what Telenous wrote...

He said photography can record reality or can lie, but because it deals only with the past and is poor at narrative (unlike writing - or moving images like video), it lacks context. So, a photograph can tell the truth but it's a circumscribed, restricted kind of truth.

Your own example of a passport undermines your statement. A passport photo by itself is insufficient as evidence of a truth - our identity - unless supported by words. Think of documentary photography as a whole: without words - captions, newspaper articles, headlines, book titles - the photographs lose their meaning. Capa's D-Day photographs or that image of Neil Armstrong's first footprint both require descriptions to convey meaning...

Photographs can tell the truth - and has a very particular connection with reality. Telenous mentioned "index", and in linguistics this word has a very particular use: that which conveys meaning through a direct connection with reality. A footprint is an index - and so is a photograph. Writing or a painting is not an index, as both are symbols - interpretations - of reality.

So, photographs are evidence of reality - but typically fail to describe that pictured event from the past: without something more (accompanying words, a series of images - e.g. a documentary film) they cannot convey the context of their truth.

It is photography's unique connection with truth and reality but its inability to convey either adequately leading to ambiguity that drew me to become a photographer.

 

[Margu]

Rubbish! Read what Telenous wrote...

He said photography can record reality or can lie, but because it deals only with the past and is poor at narrative (unlike writing - or moving images like video), it lacks context. So, a photograph can tell the truth but it's a circumscribed, restricted kind of truth.

Your own example of a passport undermines your statement. A passport photo by itself is insufficient as evidence of a truth - our identity - unless supported by words. Think of documentary photography as a whole: without words - captions, newspaper articles, headlines, book titles - the photographs lose their meaning. Capa's D-Day photographs or that image of Neil Armstrong's first footprint both require descriptions to convey meaning...

Photographs can tell the truth - and has a very particular connection with reality. Telenous mentioned "index", and in linguistics this word has a very particular use: that which conveys meaning through a direct connection with reality. A footprint is an index - and so is a photograph. Writing or a painting is not an index, as both are symbols - interpretations - of reality.

So, photographs are evidence of reality - but typically fail to describe that pictured event from the past: without something more (accompanying words, a series of images - e.g. a documentary film) they cannot convey the context of their truth.

It is photography's unique connection with truth and reality but its inability to convey either adequately leading to ambiguity that drew me to become a photographer.

you called my argument rubbish, well, at least my "rubbish" post made sense......

 

[airfrogusmc]

Art School Twaddle. She'll grow out of it, hopefully.

Any show of visual art that has to have an explanation attached to the work itself is, IMO, deficient. The work either works, or it doesn't, and thats a function of its aesthetics, both as singular works and as a body of work. Explanation just needlessly circumscribes the potential effect of the work.

Plus, I've never met a really good visual artist who had any real idea about what the work meant. The best answer, when asked, "what does it mean?" is usually to point at it and say "It means that."

WOW I don't know where to start. For creative people we have such narrow definitions (LoL). Every great photo book I have ever seen has either an artist statement or a foreword. Every great exhibit I have seen always has an artist statement and the works of some really good photographers like Duane Michals actually write on the images in many cases.

Most of the really important photographers all know what their images are about. How do we know this, read the artist statements and the books they wrote. Actually having an understanding of what the work is really about is one way that they separate themselves from most that don't have a clue.

There is little truth in photographs. Some can be records but they are still way outside our life's experience. They freeze a moment in time. They are two dimensional. As Wingrand said so well, they are descriptions of what something looks like to a camera.

Heres a few words by a few that spent their lives doing it.
"What the photographer taking the picture and the historian viewing it must understand is that while the camera deals with recording factual things and events that form the subject of the photograph, it only produces a perceived reality that is remembered after the thing or event has passed. While people believe that photographs do not lie, this is an illusion caused by the mistaken belief that the subject and the picture of the subject is the same thing. One is reminded of the written inscription on the famous painting of a "pipe" by the Cubist painter Rene Magritte that refutes what we believe we are seeing by saying "This is not a pipe." Indeed it is a painting of a pipe and not a real pipe in the same way that a photograph of a subject is both an artifact and a record of what the photographer captured with his camera from nature. Because we see reality in different ways, we must understand that we are looking at different truths rather than the truth and that, therefore, all photographs lie in one way or another. Today's technological advances in digital manipulation of images that the public sees regularly in photographs and films now only makes it easier to understand what has always been true."- John Szarkowski

Wingorand; he gets on point about 1:26 in.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl4f-QFCUek

I do believe if you have developed your own way of seeing it can transcend subject matter so that anything that you shoot will have you in it. There is truth in that. Truth should be in the way the artist views the world which may or may not be truthful to others. So in that regard I feel to make an honest statement about how the artist feels about life and the world are important but that is always the artists truth which is usally a narrow view but an important one.

"You should be able to look at me and see my work. You should be able to look at my work and see me." - Roy DeCarava

In my opinion thats the truth thats important.

Thats my 2 cent and I want to close with Merry Christmas.

 

[tunalegs]

you called my argument rubbish, well, at least my "rubbish" post made sense......

Their response makes sense to me.

A single static image cannot hope to give but a small hint of the reality it captured.

Have you ever come across a box of old photos at a junk shop or antique store? Do you know who the people are in the photo? Why they're taking a photo? Where they are? When they're from?

About all you can be sure of is that at some point, they stood in front of a camera, and here is the photo to prove it. Sharp eyes may be able to study the architecture, fashions, or vehicles that appear in the background to provide a bit of context to time and place - but the most important part, the people - who knows?