Narrative and Photographs

Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris recently concluded a seven part blog series entitled “The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock.” He takes up questions of authenticity and realism in regards to the F.S.A. photographers of the 1930s, whose work was funded by the New Deal and carried a political charge.

Before looking at the content of these posts, it’s useful to take a step back and see what marvelous use Errol Morris is making of the blog form. He has begun to make mini-projects out of small series of blogs. These are not book length inquiries, and they employ multiple visual images that would be difficult.. or at least expensive.. in a print format. The posts also do not have the formality of an article for a magazine such as the New Yorker. Morris presents stretches of interviews that he has conducted, breaking in to comment and point out oddities. Below is a list of these series on his New York Times blog:

detail from NY Times

Errol Morris’ blog is the best example I’ve seen of how blogging could be a platform for research. Imagine if academics, (especially in the humanities where the danger of a “scoop” is not really a worry), were constantly working through ideas and presenting them in this fashion.

Now back to the actual contents of this series. One example that Morris highlights is the case of Arthur Rothstein, a photographer who discovered the bleached skull of a steer and decided it was too good of a prop to let go to waste where it was found. Rothstein goes on to take a number of pictures that feature this skull. Errol Morris on this post shows a number of the skull images. One of those photos got picked up and reprinted with the following caption:

From Pennington, South Dakota, comes this photo of a bleached skull on a sun-baked grassless plain giving solemn warning that here is a land the desert threatens.

The photo thus comes to stand for drought and desertification in the west. This version of events brings political implications about the role of the federal government. So when news gets out that the steer skull was moved to capture this perfect image of a skull on parched cracked ground, people attempt to discredit the photo. Morris recounts the controversy:

…the Fargo Forum gets a hold of one of the alternate shots. And they publish that, and it appears in the newspaper, on the day when Franklin Roosevelt’s train is arriving in town. And it becomes a big political cause, because they argue if you’re going to cart something like this object around, you can take this picture anywhere. All you have to do is have a little arid land. It doesn’t prove that the Dakotas are the prime example of drought, desolation and devastation.

Morris goes on to work through the details of this case and what we can know about the circumstances of these photos. His documentarian nature is on display. What is missing is a theoretical backdrop for this discussion about photos.. which I am moved to try to sketch here.

The situation with the steer skull reminded me of discussions from the presidential campaign of last year. There was some discussion about why certain gaffes or lines get taken up by the media while others are dropped. One way to explain this is to talk about the “narrative” of a campaign. To the extent that a gaffe or some event plays into the unfolding narrative, they are amplified. When the event does not play into the narrative it is forgotten. When Dan Quayle misspells potato, it is news and a late-night joke precisely because it reinforces what people already think. It is a hook on which to hang a story line that already exists.

Photographs work in a similar way as a campaign gaffe. This photo of a skull on parched land becomes iconic because it matches the narrative that exists in peoples’ minds. Then the power of a photo or other work of art will come to not only match a narrative, but lend emotional reinforcement to that narrative. There is a dynamic between representations and narrative, both dependent on each other.

So what happens if someone lives in South Dakota and does not particularly care for the mainstream narrative about his or her home? The intuitive place to start is the undermining of the supporting representations for that narrative. This would mean calling into question the cultural authority of a photo that supports the narrative. Thus the photo becomes a site of contention. The narrative battle comes to center on the representation and its legitimacy. If a representation can be “shown to be a fake” then a counter narrative has a chance of arising and supplanting the other. (I’m not saying that this is what people are consciously thinking, but it is the underlying dynamic of discussions.)

It’s at this point that the notion of “realism” becomes interesting. Realism has become our culturally hallowed field for narrative battles. That is not universally the case. Reading the ancient Greeks it is fascinating the way myth and genealogy become the sites of contention for competing narratives—perhaps exactly because they lacked the ability to represent the world with the quickness and accuracy we have. In the present realism is the accepted standard for legitimacy, with perhaps a ten foot rule for moving a skull around. But there is nothing essential or universal about realism as arbiter; it is a contemporary agreed-upon framework for battling out narrative conflict.

This also means that the nature of representation is seriously misunderstood by those who argue back and forth whether this or that was authentic. Realism is a red herring. What matters is the social process by which a representation (photo, novel, film, anecdote) comes to prop up and lend emotional force to a narrative. Groups are always taking up representations and plugging them into the narrative frames through which they understand the world.

Morris emphasizes the symbolic value of images at the conclusion of his series:

A dust storm can be real or imagined. In one sense, it matters whether the storm is real; in another, all that matters is the image which extends through time, the memory of the storm. In the ’30s it was a plea for help; now it is a story of triumph over adversity. We see the father and his two sons hunkered down, heading towards the chicken coop. It is an image that defines the boy, his brother and his father. It becomes part of how he sees himself and his family. It becomes his connection with a father who is no longer alive. It is not just that day that is captured in the photograph, it is how he has come to see his childhood. And how we have come to see an entire era. It brings time forward, but also compresses it, collapses it into one moment. It is the idea that the photograph captures that endures.

I like that, but it is still not quite clear enough about what is really happening. As time passes the photo plugs into many different narratives.. and also plays a part in the self-understanding of the people photographed. When Morris writes “we have come to see an entire era” through the photo, Morris means that a particular historical narrative (America in the Great Depression) has been made concrete in an image of a man, his son, and a chicken coop. That high symbolic value could not have gotten a foothold without a degree of trust in its authenticity, but now that it has arrived as an icon, it isn’t really about what is real or fake anymore. It represents.