Fascinating article about the “meaning” behind photographs. Give yourself some time - but since Errol Morris is involved - you should make it.
I spent a considerable amount of time looking at the two photographs and thinking about the two sentences. Sontag, of course, does not claim that Fenton altered either photograph after taking them – only that he altered or “staged” the second photograph by altering the landscape that was photographed. This much seems clear. But how did Sontag know that Fenton altered the landscape or, for that matter, “oversaw the scattering of the cannonballs on the road itself?”
About Errol Morris:
Errol Morris is a documentary filmmaker whose movie The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2004. He also directed Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line, Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control and A Brief History of Time, among other films. His new film, “Standard Operating Procedure,” will be released next year. A companion book, co-written with Philip Gourevitch, will also appear in 2008. He lives in Cambridge, Mass.
me, i would have just drawn some red lines on the photos and called it a day
Love your sense of humor, man! Nice surprise to see this blog up and running again.
Seems to me that Fenton shot what was there. The idea of the soldiers recycling the cannon balls makes total sense to me. Especially in a war that was notoriously bad in it’s supply side execution (sound familiar).
And yes, a red marker would have been much more succinct.
Red parallel lines.
Have you read Roland Barthes’ “Camera Lucida”? Similar stuff from a different point de vue. A really good read.
Never mind.