Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography

By Errol Morris

2011

310 pages

Nonfiction

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Seeing is believing, right? If you can’t trust a photograph, what can you trust? By the end of this book you’ll be rethinking that. Rather, believing is seeing, or so says the title of filmmaker Errol Morris’s book.

Every time I write one of these reviews I am reminded of how much I like the book I’m reviewing. I suppose it is eventually meaningless to say this is one of my favorite books (again). But for what it’s worth, this is one of my favorite books.

As you would expect from a book about a visual art, Believing Is Seeing is full of photographs. They aren’t always beautiful in the conventional sense, but they are all wrapped up in the questions and arguments that Morris wishes to make. Though it seems impossible to commit spoilers in a book about photography, I assure you I need to tread carefully here. There are great mysteries here, and I don’t want to spoil what is an exquisite journey.

I can say that, even if photographs don’t lie, they are limited in the truth they tell. Beginning with what the photographer includes in her picture and what she crops out, then later when a caption might be added by someone other than the photographer, and then again where the photograph is actually presented (its context), it will become clear that the picture might become more than a little fuzzy. Yes, the irony in the last sentence is intentional.

The book begins with a mystery. The first great war photograph was taken during the Crimean War, and it depicts the landscape and road with cannonballs scattered about. But there are two different pictures made very close to the same time: one in which the cannonballs are on the road and another in which they are not. Was one of the pictures staged? Were the cannonballs moved in order to make a more gripping picture? Is this fair artistically and, more importantly, does it tell the truth? I will leave you to read and find out how all that comes out.

Every chapter is equally fascinating with mysteries and questions of truth and artistic license. I suppose it might be obvious why I think this is a great book for preachers. We too wrestle with the attempt to bring artistry into our presentations, to say what we have to say in the most gripping ways, all with the knowledge that there is a line we cannot cross – a line that would lead to us obscuring the truth rather than drawing it out more clearly.

One of my favorite chapters in the book is about the famous Mickey Mouse doll war photo. In its moment, it was every bit as gripping as the now-famous photo of the dazed little boy in Syria. But there are serious questions to ask about the photo, which is, without a doubt, one of those pictures that says more than 1,000 words. And yet ...

Well, you just have to read it.