Pause to Wonder

A group of Czech artists who inserted a nuclear explosion into a national weather broadcast have been told by a prosecutor they could be sent to jail. [see video, read BBC article…]

I have to admit, my first reaction was laughter. Lots. It reminded me of Orson Well’s little stunt.

Then, I started thinking. What a cynic I’ve become! It never even occurred to me that people would see the footage and think it was real. Guess I’ve seen too many movies, used Photoshop too often — and I never watch television, so I’m not used to reality feeds. I am as skeptical of images as I am of what I read in the paper.

It’s a given that you don’t just accept and believe whatever you hear or read, whether it be in the media, the local pub or what one co-worker says about another. You look at alternate sources, you ask around, you keep in mind likely biases, you think about it.

So why doesn’t this automatically apply to images? More precisely: to photographs and video? We don’t look at a cartoon and think: “Oh my god, that chicken knows how to drive a car and I can see what he’s saying!” I think it’s safe to say that most people in most cultures don’t confuse reality with depictions of reality.

So why is photography (and by extension, video) different? I guess, because it’s new (150-odd years) compared to drawing, sculpting, painting, etc. which we’ve been doing for eons. And perhaps also because it seems scientific due to the more or less mysterious mechanical/chemical processes involved.

But from the very beginning of photography, people were making adjustments. Why, then, are we still so quick to believe photos? Why does it seem disappointing and even disturbing not to be able to believe images? Perhaps because there’s no obvious filter between us and the realness of the image: no brush strokes in the paint, no pencil lines on the paper, chisel marks in the marble — photos just look so damn real. Like what we see with our own eyes. And if you can’t believe your own eyes… what can you trust, what can you believe? What links us to reality?

This reminds me of an essay by Montaigne on the importance of truth between people: “we have no other bond with one another but our word”.

P.S. The Montaigne link just above is an episode from a television series done for BBC 4 by Alain de Botton, who is one of my favorite authors. I discovered it utterly by chance when looking for a good Montaigne link. I’ve never seen any of the episodes before, so this is a gift from the gods as it’s not available on DVD (yet?). Enjoy!! To support the man, and for a wonderful book, pick up his “Consolations of Philosophy” or any of his others, they’re all extremely good.