Why Trust Pictures?

(Charles Johnson, littlegreenfootballs.com)

Errol Morris (one of my favorite filmmakers) has been blogging (or producing a series of essays) for the New York Times for the past few months, mainly on the the complexities of the documentary craft. His latest entry starts off with the famous doctored photo of the Iranian missile launch published in July of 2008, then examines the question of whether photos “provide illustration of a text or an idea of evidence of some underlying reality or both? And if they are evidence, don’t we have to know that the evidence is reliable, that it can be trusted?”

From the piece:

People often trust low-res images because they look more real. But of course they are not more real, just easier to fake. We look at picture of Nessie (the Loch Ness Monster). It’s grainy, fuzzy. It’s hard to make anything out. You never see a 10-megapixel photograph of Big Foot or the Abominable Snowman or the Loch Ness Monster. One explanation is: these monsters don’t exist. But if they did exist — so the thinking goes — they are probably unwilling to sit still for portraiture. The grainy images are proof of how elusive Nessie can be. This belief extends to documentary filmmaking, as well. If it’s badly shot, it’s more authentic.

I have to admit here that I’m not really that concerned with whether or not bigfoot exists or not. What really interests me about bigfoot (or UFOs, or Atlantis, or God, etc.) is this: Why do we believe what we believe? When evidence or facts contradict our beliefs, sometimes we choose to modify their beliefs, but sometimes we don’t budge, doing their best to deny or disprove those facts. Is that really a choice we make? Is it somehow hard-wired into our system? Is there some line in our brain across which no logic or evidence may pass? Is that line mutable?

Anyway, enough of my babbling (I may do a post in the future examining this a bit more closely).

Link to the article

• National Geographic on Bigfoot
• Vanity Fair at the Texas Bigfoot Conference
• Pretty Pictures by Roger Hagadone
• Woot Shirt: Bigfoot/Nessie ‘08
• Pink Panther Sasquatch Footprint Found in British Columbia