Gravity trumps sunlight!!

"What seems a detour has a way of becoming, in time, a direct route." R. Powers, Three Farmers...

[Note: if you're new to the series, don't know what's going on, and want a shortcut, I'd say you can start with Part 3, skip the sidebars, and still cut a reasonable swath.]

It was gravity. Gravity gives us the answer. Not sunlight, not the pathetic fallacy, not Olga the tour guide, not forensic expertise about the shine off the cannonball. Gravity. So there.

As Morris says: "And so, it turns out that Keller, Haworth-Booth and Sontag are right. It is OFF before ON." Fenton placed the cannonballs onto the road. After taking the original picture with the cannonballs off the road, he had them moved.

Some of the rocks had rolled and/or been kicked downhill in the picture that came second. "The whole shadow thing turns out to be a red herring," Morris says. His friend Dennis Purcell found the rock movement. He noticed when comparing the two images of the battle-famous road in the Valley of the Shadow of Death that he could identify common objects (the rocks) and check their placement against each other. He even named the rocks -- Fred, Oswald, George, Marmaduke, and Lionel. That's right, he named the rocks, giving them an identity, providing them character, allowing for their pathos to come through.

Naming the objects of study is perhaps not unusual under ordinary circumstances, but certainly worth extra mention in the context of Morris's quest given the meandering path, the detours, he'd taken to get to the end. He used the pathetic fallacy w/r/t the cannonballs in pursuit of a question that got past the pathetic fallacy w/r/t Fenton, to Fenton's pathos. Instead of solving the cannonball mystery by figuring out what Fenton *must have wanted to do* -- to appear dangerous, to conceal cowardice, to circulate a scene that is maximally violent or sad or effective, I don't know -- he gave identity to a bunch of inanimate rocks, tracked their day, gave them a story, and watched them go downhill. In OFF, the named rocks are higher; in ON, they are lower. This shows that OFF came first. The rocks simply wanted to roll downhill. Gravity made them do it.

Of course gravity doesn't do anything, it doesn't have agency so that it can do things to us. It isn't a thing. It is our human way of understanding how things happen. What it is, how we know, blah blah blah. But how tantalizing to consider it all.

Now here I am at the end.

Which came first? The picture with cannonballs on it, or the one with the cannonballs to the side? A simple question, which seems to bring a simple quest. Errol Morris finds that such is not the case. His experiment in the production of visual knowledge -- or in the truth value of an image, or in the means by which one decides truth value, or in a study of who to ask, how to find out, where to go -- works across several months and several continents.

How do we know which came first? That's the more central query. Morris's investigation leads him to shadow expert and photo expert and literary expert and forensic expert and software expert. It leads him to reconstruct the scene. It leads him to question the identity of visual imagery. It leads him to write an 80 page essay on the matter. It leads me to write a fourteen-part (give or take) series wondering about all of the above.

If it's a matter of visual images, then it is also a matter of the means to produce visual images. It is about technology. About technique. About the technical skill to do the production. It is about cameras and photography, fair enough. But it is also about newspapers, reporters, wars, cannonballs, carriages, soldiers, the organization of the military, the politics of personality, the politics of nineteenth-century empire, the presence of the media as a communications outlet, the decisions made by technicians--we never learn the name of Fenton's assistants, for example, the invisible technicians who actually do the work--the public value of images, the newfound promise of precision and frozen scenes in a picture, the ideals that adjudicate what a proper picture is, Fenton himself, the chemicals used to process the film, the chemical process itself as a solid bundle of knowledge. Et cetera.

If it's about visual images, then it is also about the production of visual knowledge. It is about science and scientific practice. It is about methods and values, about the goal of identifying something that is out there (reality), locking it into static form (imagery, representation), and sharing it (the world of science, communication, reporting, reading/viewing). The visual image is portable, transportable, you can put it in a folder and carry it to the next lab, the next country, the next continent. The image should represent the same thing no matter where you take it. The image is a representation of information. It can be used to produce knowledge. It is not, by itself, knowledge. It may be called objective, but how much does that label conceal? It is unfettered by local context or by the whims of the photographer. Unless you take two of them and don't tell anyone which one was sincere, which one was set up. Well, unless unless unless...there are many things that could complete that sentence. But I'll stick with the doubleness problem, the which came first.

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison happened to have been wondering the same things, more or less. Although they've been doing it for longer, their book, Objectivity, came out about the same time Morris was jet-setting to the edge of the Black Sea and back. Their questions were aimed just at that point in history where the meaning of the picture comes in. (They are now both, I add by way of side note, interviewees in the CBC's "How to Think about Science" series -- Episode #2; Episode #17.) One can produce an image and one can say what that image represents. But what it represents is no simple claim.

It is one thing to recognize the reality of nature, another thing to make claims about that reality. That's a shift. There is a space between the two. In that space lies all the work of science.

But Morris has a new documentary out just now, Standard Operating Procedure, about the photographs at Abu Ghraib. He co-wrote an article with Philip Gourevitch in The New Yorker about the topic, the article being part of their forthcoming co-authored book on the subject. He's also moved on at his blog to a new series of posts about the place of re-enactments in documentaries. It's fulfilling to read his new posts in light of having read his last set. The two are so intertwined. Commenters about his re-enactment posts seem to be making many of the same points commenters about the Cannonball posts did. Most of them seek to close down the issue with haste.

I was glad to have let it simmer for a while, taking the detours that ended up a direct route.