We want photographs to be true

Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; 2006 © Jeff Wall

December 2007, Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco: On one of the walls hangs an enormous photograph by Jeff Wall. It shows young people, fashionably dressed, on a city street, waiting to get into a disco. The scene is not reminiscent of life in the streets of San Francisco (or of any other city in the world), the scene is reminiscent of TV-pictures: it depicts the reality in the minds of movie directors, it has not much to do with real life in which people rarely look like the ones in TV-series.

The photo (not least because of its extraordinary format) fascinated me, attracted me. I liked it in the way that I like the sundaes from McDonalds — 100% artificial, guaranteed no natural ingredients added. At the same time it irritated me, it put me off. I did not want to like it for this wasn't really photography the way I understood it (to document what one encounters). This had more to do with film, or with the theatre, or with painting actually. The other images in the exhibition also appeared as if Wall had photographed the pictures inside his head.

Wall's probably most famous photo "Dead Troops Talk (A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986)" was made with actors in the studio and photographed in individual sections that were later assembled digitally. On a stony slope one can see dead and wounded soldiers, scattered weapons, and pools of blood. Susan Sontag (2003) referred to this image as the "opposite of a document." Since we essentially label photographs as documents — we want them to serve as evidence, as proof, as memorabilia — one can thus safely ask whether pictures such as "Dead Troops Talk" should actually be considered photographs.

Well, a camera was used, a trigger was pulled, a photo was made. And, anyway: lots of photos are staged for the camera. Still photographs at movie sets, for instance, or family shots, or portraits, or the photo ops of political leaders, or many documentary photographs. Why then this unease? Because I expect photos to show me the world as the photographer found it; I do not expect them to show me the photographer's fantasy world. Needless to say, the imagined reality and the real one out there are intertwined but photographers who approach the physical world with the idea of a "decisive moment" (Cartier-Bresson) in which the best pictures are taken will often come back with images that differ considerably from the ones that were done by someone who deem their work in the darkroom, or at the computer more important. In other words: attitude matters.

***
We do not want photographs to be fakes; we expect them to not deceive us, we want them to be real, and we want them to be true.

We do of course know that sometimes they are not and that they often do not show us the way things really are. This does not mean that we accept to be lied to — though it happens anyway. Remember George Bush, Jr, on Thanksgiving 2003, when, with the American troops in Iraq, he was showing off a plastic turkey to the cameras? Or, more recently, at the Olympic Games in Beijing where — courtesy of the political leadership — a nice looking young girl was moving her lips for the cameras — she looked the part but couldn't sing — while the voice of another, less beautiful girl could be heard?

The problem here is that, a few months or years from now, we will (if we knew it at all) have forgotten this contextual information and that only the images will stay with us. "Image outlives fact," the photographer Lisa Kahane pointed out. Propagandists know this, we should too.