Fascination With Photographs

I found the article, “Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire,” by Errol Morris, to be very insightful and thought provoking. He brought up points about the nature of photography that I had not given much thought to. Morris focuses on the contextual nature of pictures and how the meanings of each photograph can be changed based on our knowledge of the context. The example he provided of the Lusitania was very interesting to me especially because in my AP American History class my teacher provided us with an alternative context for this exact same picture. He explained that it was suspect that Americans wanted to become involved in the war but since we always have to play the victim we could not attack another country so we sent a boat into a line of German fire that we were well aware was present there, thus giving us a reason to enter into the war because we were ‘attacked.’ Now I am not saying this theory is true but it just goes to show how many different meanings one photograph can have depending on the context that is provided. Another concept I liked from the article was when Morris was looking at pictures of his own family and he inquired to himself “Who are these people? Do they have anything to do with me? Do I really know them?” The simple fact that we can be a completely different person than we were in an old picture is fascinating to me. The fact that we cannot ever really remember or know what that version of our self was thinking or feeling in that moment captured by the camera. I have an absurd amount of pictures from high school and middle school due to my picture-obsessed friend and going back to look at these pictures is really entertaining and interesting to me. In so many of these pictures my friends and I will be doing something weird and I wonder to myself ‘Honestly, what were we thinking?’ or there are a bunch of pictures of us doing some inside joke that I cannot even bring myself to remember anymore. Morris does a great job of capturing the transitory and contextual nature of photographs that fascinates me so much. One thing Morris says accurately sums up, I believe, the main message of his article, “Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but there are two words that you can never apply to them: “true” and “false.”’