August 23, 2004

You can't fake how damn cold it was How fake is fake? I report, you decide.
posted by Wolof 20 years ago
  • Antarctic expeditions are something of a hobby of mine. This is really interesting, thanks!
  • I'm just going outside for a while. I .. I may be some time.
  • How the hell am I supposed to tell how cold it was if I can't see any nipples? And while we're on the subject of Antarctica and while I wait in rapt suspense for notification of whether I'm going to be working down there this summer or not, check out Big Dead Place (not totally safe for work if work doesn't like the word "fuck" in bold, size three caps) for insights into what's going on on Earth's last great frontier these days
  • "If the negative delivered him the drama and the sense of the event he wanted, he would be happy with that," Ms Ennis said. If not, "he wanted something more true, more real, more experiential". Right. Lie = truth. I'm sorry to see the defining malady of our times goes back that far.
  • That's harsh languagehat, though I concede your point. I'm more sympathetic, given how far out of his way Frank Hurley would go to get a shot. Not to mention how many exposures he had to discard when they were forced to abandon ship.
  • I prefer lies. You know where you stand with a good, solid lie - "truth" just gets you an endless argument. Besides, my favourite work of art - "Police Academy 5, Assignment: Miami Beach" - was wholly fictional, and yet it is slightly superior to other gems of the series based entirely on true stories. Even the brilliant "Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow"!
  • Antarctic expeditions are something of a hobby of mine. god feel so boring. my hobby is petting my dog.
  • surlyboi, what might you be doing this summer?
  • the defining malady of our times What!? I would have said that the expectation that an image provide a literal, authentic rendering is a malady, and a very modern (starting from the first photographs) and unhelpful one at that. The sooner we return to treating all images as art rather than evidence, the happier we will all be.
  • IT for Raytheon Polar Services at McMurdo, Darshon. That's if I get the job.
  • You'll be flying south from Christchurch, surly? I know someone who lives there if you need a place to stay on the way through. I'm pretty sure all the US Antarctic flights go through here.
  • vitalorgnz: I presume you also believe that there is no such thing as a "true" account in words; there are only stories, and everyone is entitled to their own story. If one person says the earth is flat and another says it's round, if one group says a massacre happened and another says it didn't, it's all good. What's true for you isn't true for me and vice versa, and no more can be said. "Facts" are an archaic concept of the premodern era. Like I said, the defining malady of our times.
  • I am seriously envious of surlyboi (assuming he gets the job) Good luck, surlyboi
  • languagehat: no, not at all. Bloody hell. Photos generally look more real than a drawing, and this makes it seductively easy to treat them as documentary evidence, when they are not. The fact that an image arrives via a camera rather than a human with a pencil does not guarantee its accuracy. Even framing, composition, cropping, filtering or lighting choices seriously affect the account they give us, let alone gross manipulation like removing Trotsky or adding faces to the crowd. I know you know this too, which is why I'm even more perplexed. I don't believe that all accounts are equally good. (Although sometimes none of them may be right, or some are worse than others, or we can't tell which one. How many people were at yesterday's rally?) I believe all photos are suspect and deserve our skepticism. I do not see how you can extend that to presuming that I don't give a toss for objective truth. So anyway, when you said "defining malady of our times", it seemed to me that mistaking authentic-seeming images for reality is a pretty serious malady of our times too. By the way, is it too big a stretch to imagine Ennis's use of "truth" as shorthand for "true to the emotions the photographer wished to convey"? That would be more charitable than making her part of the Postmodern Conspiracy to Destroy Reality.
  • OK, I see better what you're getting at, and I apologize for enlisting you in the Postmodern Brigade against your will. I completely agree that "all photos are suspect and deserve our skepticism"; words are suspect too. My problem is not with the skeptical audience (thee and me) but with the mendacious creator. It's one thing if you want to openly manipulate photos to produce works of art; it's quite another to surreptitiously do so in order to make people think the world is different than it is or things happened differently than they did, all in the name of some "higher truth." I'll stick with boring old reality, thanks. Hence my irritation with Hurley; I really don't see the difference between passing off faked photos as fact and someone like Claud Cockburn (a leftist journalist of the '30s) passing off a faked story of a republican offensive in Spain as fact -- they both have the defense of the "higher truth," and I think they're both full of shit.
  • *prepares cheerleading costume for surlyboi's new job*