Truth

Allen Herbert · October 12, 2013

What is truth in photography?

Truth gives power. It embodies trust, and integrity.

Or, does it? what it is truth is there a deeper percetion of truth a more challenging honest truth?

Allen Herbert · October 12, 2013

Sontag argues that through repeatedly capturing and viewing reality through photographs, their subjects can become less real. She claims that “aesthetic distance seems built into the very experience of looking at photographs”, and also that the sheer volume of horrific images throughout the world has produced a “familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem more ordinary – making it appear familiar, remote … inevitable”.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_claim_(photography)#cite_note-18">[</a>

BelaMolnar · October 12, 2013

Truth is relative. It's depend on, witch side of the fence you standing. Seeking the truth can be very dangerous too, as history show us all the time. Information over load, visual or other form, conditioning the mind to the point of insensibility.

michaellinder · October 12, 2013

The OP is an age-old philosophical issue, dressed in different clothing. When there is closure on that issue, we also may have an answer to the OP.

In the meantime, I'm not sure that photographs can be either true or false. They may be representational to a certain degree; or they may be authentic in the sense that they are faithful to the subject matter. But, truth or falsity are property of statements (or propositions, depending on one's philosophical bent).

Sanford · October 12, 2013

I have decided to accept whatever Wikipedia says is true as the absolute truth, in most cases. Whether something is "true" or not in the true sense of the truth is really immaterial as long as Wiki satisfies my search. Of course if I was deciding on a new camera or car I might have to do a little further research.

charleswood · October 13, 2013

Maybe the broadest truth that a photograph can embody is an affirmation that humans have the ability to create.

Julie H · October 13, 2013

The claim, via title or context of presentation, about the truth that a photographer is showing, and my (as viewer's) belief or disbelief in, as well as pre-existing knowledge about, that claim are not "in" the photograph.

If you show me a picture of a ball and title it "Cube," I'm going to doubt its truthfulness. Or, if I don't know what a "cube" is, I won't (be able to) make any judgment of truth value. None of this has any effect on the picture; the picture simply is. Photographs are supporting evidence to claims made (or not made). They do not, in themselves, make any claims at all ...

... which, I admit, is a little like the claim that "guns don't kill people ... " The evidence that photos provide supports (confirms, disconfirms, strengthens or weakens) claims that matter a great deal. Given that no voluntary movement of any kind by any person happens absent true belief, evidence that may affect those actions becomes complicit.

AJHingel · October 13, 2013

Alan, good question.

I have got much inspiration from poetry and abstract painting which claim, that they are more true than the so-called reality we all see with our two eyes (read: straight photography). Absolute truth does not exist. Even bold lies are a sort of truth.

"My images are abstract and surrealistic, but they are true. Paraphrasing B. Cendrars.

michaellinder · October 13, 2013

OK, Anders, I'll bite. If absolute truth does not exist, it must follow that truth is relative. Relative to whom? To what? And what criteria are used to decide?

Julie H · October 13, 2013

Michael asked: "Relative to whom? To what?"

As with movement, relative to one's chosen frame of reference. Are you moving? Relative to what? Relative to whom?

[I neither agree nor disagree with Anders's post. I am only addressing the "relative to" question.]

Norma Desmond · October 13, 2013

In photography, point of view may be truth.

_____________________________

Character, genuineness, openness, and willingness ring more true to me than accuracy.

_____________________________

Relative to whom?

Perhaps each of us as individuals and all of us as a collective.

To what?

Perhaps history, society, culture, and the times.

_____________________________

Erich Fromm:

There is no absolute truth but there are objectively valid laws and principles.

The history of science is a history of inadequate and incomplete statements, and every new insight makes possible the recognition of the inadequacies of previous propositions and offers a springboard for creating a more adequate formulation.

Knowledge is not absolute but optimal; it contains the optimum of truth attainable in a given historical period.

_____________________________

Picasso:

Art is a lie that tells the truth.

Lou_Meluso · October 13, 2013

I agree with Anders here. Truthful photographic still representations of the world, no matter how seemingly accurate, are not reality, ipso facto cannot be TRUTH. Photography, by it's very nature, is only a subset of reality. Beyond the pedestrian difficulties of mapping a three dimensional space onto a two dimensional one, every choice a photographer makes, biases the truth just a bit more.

I'm reminded of the Belgian painter Rene Margritte's famous <a href="http://collections.lacma.org/node/239578">painting of a smoking pipe</a> titled, appropriately, "The Treachery of Images". Under the rendering of the pipe are the words (in French) "This is not a pipe". In other words, this is only a representation of truth, it, in itself, is not truth.

Abstract, surrealistic and other non-representational approaches don't have have this burden of showing reality so the "truthfulness" is based more on the artist's vision, intellect and emotions.

Keats, writes in his poem <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/101/625.html">"Ode on a Grecian Urn"</a> that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty". He may be right about that but I don't think he was talking about photographic representations.

sgust · October 13, 2013

What is a truth? I define it as a statement that is true, or put differently not false. To assign a truth assessment to an image is to evaluate it's statement. And therein lies the problem. Many, if not most, images don't have an explicitly stated purpose or statement to make, documentary imagery being a notable exception. If you can't define the statement that the image is making you can't evaluate it's truthfulness. And also, when getting into images that do have statement, the more ambiguous the statement the less you can say about it's truthfulness as well. I can see this being the case with may artistic works.

OK, that's my off hand opinion for the day. Feel free to tear it apart.

AJHingel · October 13, 2013

Ill risk an eys and try to be more precise on how I would see the question on truth and photography, but first the question on truth in science.

Truth in science does not exist. Science produces knowledge, but knowledge that continuously questioned and subsequently revised, producing even better knowledge or whole new knowledge about natural or social phenomena. I think can only link the question about truth and science by saying that science stice towards true knowledge about the world by eliminating slowly over time false knowledge.

For me truth and photography is opening totally different questions than that of scientific inquiry. As I see it, photography, as "straight photography", can of course produce knowledge as documentary knowledge, but its main objective would be to reproduce an image of the world as we would see it with eyes, if we were there. But it is still a false or flawed reality due to the limits of the media: cutting out anything outside the frame, its double "flatness" (reproduction on paper and a two-dimensional image) and not least it is an image which cuts out the use of other human senses, than the view and our mind, which are all inherent parts of how we apprehend our reality around us. The more straight photography is "artistic" or "commercial", the more it becomes a lie. Eventually a beautiful or ugly lie, but still a lie.

When it comes to any other type of photography or photographical work, approaching what could be abstraction or surrealism, I would believe, that what is at stake here is the search for what could be called an "inner truth" or the "brutal truth" about the surface-reality we can observe and mostly live in. Most of this would be a "subjective truth" of the photographer (artist) but in some cases it could reach a "liberating truth", which increases our understanding of ourselves and liberates us from a superficial view of reality we live in.

Norma Desmond · October 13, 2013

Siegfried, et al, I think truth can be, but doesn't have to be, stated. Truth can be expressed and it can be shown. Artists actually often create it.

A few of the multitude of pictures that have conveyed a truth (if not always a fact, which is something different):

Weston's <a href="http://www.edward-weston.com/images/image_pepper_index.gif">Pepper</a>.

Duchamp's <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/Duchamp_Fountaine.jpg">Fountain</a>.

Van Gogh's <a href="http://www.writedesignonline.com/resources/design/rules/VG-StarryNight.jpg">A Starry Night</a>.

Dali's <a href="http://0.tqn.com/d/arthistory/1/0/l/i/dali_moma_0708_11.jpg">The Persistence of Memory</a>.

Milton Greene's <a href="http://31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m08ezfAimy1qzfye6o1_1280.jpg">Marilyn Monroe, The Black Sitting</a>.

I also think there is truth to be found in ambiguity. Ambiguity just may make me have to look harder and wonder more to find it.

charleswood · October 13, 2013

Photographs have to represent the world because the photographer is in the world, as is the camera, and the display, and the viewer who is also in the world. It is in the world that we often see a cube labeled as a ball - a lie - except that any cube isn't a cube because 'cube' is just a word that we agree describes a like property to entirely unique things; things similar enough to appear to be similar. Add the passage of time, and a cube will become a ball, being a ball all along. Snowflake is a word for a category of objects where each snow flake is entirely dissimilar to other snowflakes. Our words -thoughts - are abstractions as are any other representations of the changing world that we might come up with. The big truths are biological: we must eat or we die an example. Another example of a biological truth is that we are all food for something else.

Here is my photographic <a href="/photo/17556823">example</a>. One of my pictures that doesn't tell a story. A Scrub-Jay comes to by back door daily. It perches on the screen door and softly calls to me. It calls to me because I'm inside with my back to it. Without it calling me, I wouldn't know it was there. But that isn't the story. The story is that I've trained the bird to do this by giving it peanuts. I wait to feed it, it comes to the door. My truth is that I've trained the jay to solicit me for my own enjoyment. The jay's truth is that the jay has trained me to feed it and it comes to the door with the impatient yet polite insistence that I continue be trained and feed it. Whose truth is the truth, mine or the scrub jay's? To me, I'm producing that pleasurable visit. To the jay, it is producing a repeatable behavior in the man, exploiting the man's soft spot for gain. Between the jay and me, truth is relative except that it is all about food. Or is it?

The scrub jay that perches on my screen door is an emissary for its family. The other two, mate and child, also wait for the result of the emissary's call. So the human/bird interaction is also about reproduction. Human's and birds reproduce themselves and their culture daily. Part of the bird's appeal to me is its adornments, its beauty, its reproduction.

For his kind and its culture the emissary is both supplicant and bold toward another species, that behavior toward humans passed on to their young through example, observation, and learning. Similarly, I'm not the first person to offer a scrub jay a peanut without trying to catch and eat them. Birds are food, but they are also beautiful. Am I beautiful to the bird, part of its motive in training me?

sgust · October 13, 2013

Anders, I'll agree that science doesn't claim any absolute truths. But it does make claims that most scientists would call true, i.e. the earth orbits the sun. There are a great many such truths that are considered true till proven false.

As far as "straight photography" intrinsically being a falsehood, I can't quite agree because we view photographs with a knowledge that its only a representation of reality. It still comes down to the statement the image makes. The statement is nearly always implied by the venue and context, but it's there none the less. I can't see how the image itself can carry any truth in and of itself, it's only after we've given the image meaning that we can say weather that meaning, or statement to put it differently, has any truth value to it.

Fred, I think for something to be true, a truth if you will, it does need to express an idea. Now that can be written, spoken, or expressed in any of a myriad of different ways that we communicate. I don't think a truth can be created, only discovered. If something is true, it is so whether we recognize it or not. As far as a truth and a fact being different, I'm not sure. Part of me agrees with you but I can't figure out what the difference is other than we give the word truth more profundity. And as far as those images conveying a truth, what would those truths be? I find the images beautiful, thought inspiring even. And those thoughts may lead me to discover a truth. But that truth wasn't in the image. If so, different people would all find the same truth in them. But my guess is that 100 people to whom the same image "speaks" will find 100 different truths.

Norma Desmond · October 13, 2013

"And as far as those images conveying a truth, what would those truths be? I find the images beautiful, thought inspiring even. And those thoughts may lead me to discover a truth. But that truth wasn't in the image. If so, different people would all find the same truth in them. But my guess is that 100 people to whom the same image "speaks" will find 100 different truths."

That's why I could never answer your question which asks "what would those truths be?" But I think your ideas get us closer to the difference between fact and truth.* IMO, a fact is a state of being. Truth involves relationship and is less objective and static.

"Facts are notes and lyrics on a piece of paper. Truth is what a singer gives to a listener." Sorry, I have no attribution for this. I read it a long time ago.

You emphasize that truth isn't in the image. I agree. And I think truth isn't in a statement either. Truth is expressed, shown, or conveyed (i.e., relationship).

_______________________________________

The metaphorical operation of a photo is why it can sometimes be so much better at expressing truths than it is at showing facts. Accuracy is about facts. Truth is more.

"There's a world of difference between facts and truth. Facts can obscure the truth." --Maya Angelou

_______________________________________

I take another look at Van Gogh's painting. I see his truth and it becomes, in some small part, mine. It's not in the painting. It's in the vision (which is shared).

User_6502147 · October 13, 2013

There is no such thing as "truth in photography". Usually, what you find is a subjective truth.

Les

Norma Desmond · October 13, 2013

Angelou, facts, truth, and Picasso . . .

Picasso's <a href="http://0.tqn.com/d/arthistory/1/0/O/0/1/picasso-met-2010-31.jpg">Head of a Woman, 1960</a>

What I take from Angelou's idea and the difference suggested between facts and truth is that we could, by getting hung up on the facts we have come to know about faces, obscure the truth of what Picasso is instead showing us.

charleswood · October 13, 2013

Head of a Woman expresses a fact to me. The difference between a fact and a truth is that (Siegfried) "...we give the word truth more profundity." For me, facts are relationships between one thing and another. One thing in that relationship may be less known than another: art can explore the boundaries where one thing meets another, revealing more facts that make our prior perception of facts seem less optimal than it had been a moment before, so we change a little.

Leszek - "There is no such thing as "truth in photography". Usually, what you find is a subjective truth."

To me that depends on how the word truth is parsed. If facts are truth, true facts can be photographed. "A picture doesn't lie" is sometimes true, we all know it from the photograph and accept a fact as a fact. A subjective truth: "we give the word more profundity" per Siegfried about truth v. facts. A subjective truth is a fact, subjective truths exist, marked by our having attached to them more value, profundity; elevated to a cherished belief, for lack of a better term, or a treasured belief. If you know in advance what people's cherished beliefs are you can endorse them or confront them in photography, art.

Green's Marilyn Monroe - The Black Sitting endorses a belief, Picasso's Head of a Woman confronts that belief. What is a fact is that we carry many subjective images of woman. Marilyn the icon was a real woman and she personally suffered for carrying on her shoulders our cherished images. Inside she looked more like Picasso's Head of a Woman. That she suffered is a fact, her suffering caused by the public confusing a cherished image with a real woman. So much for the harmlessness of cherished beliefs.

A cherished belief has its own properties, as independent of individual will as my scrub jay is independent of me. Did I train the bird or did the bird train me?

maris_rusis · October 13, 2013

Discussions about the "truth" of photography tend to go nowhere unless they embrace a sensibly formal concept of truth itself; the sort of discipline required of beginning students in philosophy classes.

Going back to philosophy 101 the concept of truth applies only to propositions. Propositions are formal statements about the nature of things. A proposition that on investigation turns out to be the case is true or not the case then untrue, a lie in other words. So the question necessarily devolves into: What formal statements does photography offer about its relationship to subject matter, to the photograph maker, and to the photograph viewer? Interestingly, those who offer the most trenchant and long winded opinions tend not to organise their thoughts in the form of propositions to state and then to test; just wooly opinion mongering in effect.

Here are a some of examples of common but silly propositions:

"A photograph of a tree is not a tree therefore photography lies". I can't remember a case of anyone credibly insisting the photograph should be physically congruent with its subject.

"A photograph is cropped from reality, it is not the "whole" truth, therefore photography lies". Does anyone reasonablyrequire the photograph to be as big and inclusive as the universe in order to be true?

"Reality is three dimensional but photographs are two dimensional therefore photography lies." Of course photographs are two dimensional but that is an inherent quality rather than a defect.

On the other hand: "All points in a photograph bear a one to one relationship to points in the subject matter". This is necessarily true of photography because of the direct physical causality of the process. Significantly this is not necessarily true of paintings, drawings, and digital pictures.

There are several other propositions that are also true of photography and it is a pleasant diversion to think of them. Examples include:

A photograph and its subject matter have to exist, however momentarily, at the same time.

A photograph begins its existence when it absorbs a sample of something that was part of the subject matter.

A photograph and its subject matter must share, however momentarily, a common line of sight.

Imaginary things cannot be depicted in a photograph.

The authority of a photograph to describe subject matter comes not from resemblance but from direct physical causation.

Photographs like life-casts, death-masks, wax impressions, graphite rubbings, and footprints are images that do not invoke the use of use of data, memories, information processors, output devices, or display devices.

There are indeed more propositions that are true of photography and it will be interesting to see how many turn up in this thread.

charleswood · October 13, 2013

Imaginary things are at times pictured in a photograph because the images from our imagination are real as images although they don't depict real things. Even your sentence "Imaginary things cannot be depicted" calls an imaginary a 'thing'. If something is imaginary, it still has power to cause behaviors, is still something. Our imaginations can't conceive of a thing that doesn't look at least a little like something that does exist: ghosts wear clothing typically, as an example. The idea 'ghost' is a thing and even in photography there are daily references to 'ghosting in images', where something imaginary allows us to describe something that does exists. In photography you could construct a dream scape that never existed and it would be of something real: the fact of a dream represented with images.

charleswood · October 13, 2013

- A photograph begins its existence when it absorbs a sample of something that was part of the subject matter.

Reflected light was not absorbed by the subject, never part of the subject, and instead become a mark of the subject on the instrument.

Norma Desmond · October 13, 2013

For me to go back to Philosophy 101 and academicize about Truth and propositions would be a big mistake. I took up Photography in order not to make that mistake (for myself).

______________________________________

Does the Greene photo exist in some sort of factual vacuum without the benefit of biographies about Marilyn and without the benefit of Picasso and others who have shown us more and given us more to think about?

Truth requires context and history gives facts context, as do other facts.

Norma Desmond · October 13, 2013

Very thoughtful points, Charles.

______________________________________

We don't get much truth from a single set of facts.

charleswood · October 14, 2013

"Does the Greene photo exist in some sort of factual vacuum without the benefit of biographies about Marilyn and without the benefit of Picasso and others who have shown us more and given us more to think about?"

I think that the Greene photo can be viewed and appreciated as if it were in a factual semi-vacuum. Perhaps that is part of its art and it doesn't have to be an image of all that is woman. Still, as you, Fred, say, a most important part of appreciating art is appreciating point of view: of the artist, the subject, and the viewer. There are many truths in and surrounding an artistic image and art appreciation involves a lot of learning about context and history, both personal and collective. We don't have much of an appreciation from a single set of facts, nor do we without also looking at other art produced then contemporaneously, and before, and since. To enjoy art isn't the same as appreciating it, the latter taking a lot more work. I think I've made past mistakes in not fully appreciating the hard work behind the contributions of the regulars in this forum.

It isn't just that all truth is relative. We also have Kurt Gödel and his first incompleteness theorem. John Allen Paulos in Beyond Innumeracy writes parenthetically "Conceivably Boris Pasternak had Gödel's theorem in mind when he wrote, "What is laid down, ordered, factual, is never enough to embrace the whole truth."" That theorem is the "so-called" first incompleteness theorem. I read that to say that any representation of an absolute truth is inherently incomplete, not absolute. I think that is where sign and symbol come to our aid, as suggestive of depth and breath we can't ever fully name, but that we can appreciate anyway.

From a Fred post in another thread, Jackson Pollack, an example of an abstract and I soooo don't want to see a theme of alienation in the canvas because in it there is so much of inter relatedness in an incomprehensible whole, you beautiful canvas you:

<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4a/No._5%2C_1948.jpg">http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4a/No._5%2C_1948.jpg</a>

Norma Desmond · October 14, 2013

"there is so much of inter relatedness in an incomprehensible whole"

Can't that be seen as a form of alienation?

"you beautiful canvas you"

Alienation can be beautiful and beauty can be alienating.

Alienation can work against the production of emotions we might expect from the beautiful canvas and instead provide the kind of spark Pollock's canvas provides.

Getting back to incomprehensibility, which you brought up and which seems important, I was reading about alienation and came across this, which might be helpful in thinking about Pollock:

"'Information overload' or the so-called 'data tsunami' are well-known information problems confronting contemporary man and, thus, meaninglessness is turned on its head."

Could Pollock's canvases be like a "data tsunami"?

charleswood · October 14, 2013

- Could Pollock's canvases be like a "data tsunami"?

Yeah, I like that. I read a little bit about him just now. <a href="http://www.forestedgepta.com/feforms/Pollock-Oct07.pdf">http://www.forestedgepta.com/feforms/Pollock-Oct07.pdf</a>

At the end is a Drip Painting Art Project for young students with emphasis on easier clean up!

I also see that his work is the subject of many debates and is described as very physical and demanding. That physicality might be a way he worked out with information overload while expressing it at the same time. So in a way, yeah, it can be one thing and another. Interesting point.

iliafarniev · October 14, 2013

Hmmm. Anything can be truth and it is not necesserily do something or another. Meanwhile one may learn to discern between nonfalsifiable truth and contextually falsifiable truth(s). Which is important because the truths can be many and they usually are variable.

"- Could Pollock's canvases be like a "data tsunami"? "

Just as much as it can be like any two random words put togeter as a comparison, metaphor or hyperbola.

AJHingel · October 14, 2013

Photography can convey truth in form of grand answers to factual questions:

The "truth" is:

<ul>

<li>that war is hell, Jeff Wall "<a href="http://wpmedia.blogs.vancouversun.com/2012/05/blogdead.jpg">Dead Troops Talk</a>" (fine art)!;</li>

<li>that civilians are dying: Nick Ut's, the<a href="http://newswire.kulmun.be/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/napalm-girl-88f02cbaad205d1edf5f19e683c39e6cb4df9c3c-s6-c10.jpg"> Napalm girl</a> (documentary);</li>

<li>that tanks can be stopped and dissidence is possible: Jeff Widener, <a href="/philosophy-of-photography-forum/%20http:/cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/china060412/t01_90605094.jpg%20">Tiananmen Square</a> (in this special case, a few hours later, contradicted by facts); and </li>

<li>that children are dying from hunger: Kevin Carter: <a href="http://prateekchandrajha.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/starving_sudanese_girl_kevin_carter_1993.jpg">South Sudan</a> (documentary).</li>

</ul>

These pictures are "true" in some concrete or general sense. They are not true in relationship to anything, IMO.

Science "does make claims that most scientists would call true"

Siegfried, I think all scientist approach some knowledge as irrefutable, but in principle always about subject matters that are to be verified over and over again by researchers in light of new knowledge and the development of ever more precise and sophisticated methodologies and testing tools. Absolute truth does not exist in science.

charleswood · October 14, 2013

Anders I'll muddy the water with alternate points of view for the same pictures (not the last one though):

Dead Troops: War is selective hell. The same war is hell for some and not for others (photographer doesn't experience a hell equal to the wounded or fallen). And some war is less hell than others, Granada for example, or Panama. And what is the factual question that the statement "war is hell" answers? Is the factual question "What is war?"

Napalm girl: Grand question: Should the press be embedded instead so that such pictures don't get made.

Tiananmen Square - One person's dissident is another person's criminal might be the grand answer that this photograph illustrates. Some would use that picture to prosecute the criminal, some would use it as an example of legitimate protest.

Norma Desmond · October 14, 2013

Allen asked:

"What is truth in photography?" [emphasis added]

Aside from—or in addition to—forensic, logical, grammatical, verbal, literal, accuracy-oriented, and perspectival approaches to truth, I like to think there are emotional, experiential, and visual truths, even art historical truths, expressed by and/or conveyed by photos and photographers.

Weston's pepper and Duchamp's urinal allow, help, or force us to see these things as we haven't. Picasso stilled for us what we might otherwise only see in a quick snap of our heads to and fro.

Allen mentioned Sontag, who also said:

"the camera's rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses"

Negation is so important to truth, and particularly to the truths of photography . . . the impact and import of what I leave out in order to frame a shot, the periphery omitted but having its own kind influence. Photography requires me to negate in this way. That consistently imposes itself on photography's truths. It might suggest an element of photographic alienation to be further explored.

To get at the truth of photography, we might have to look at how it ever expresses or conveys anything, what it does possess in addition to all its so-called propositional and logical shortcomings.

Are we too accustomed to truth being revealed to get how much truth there is in what lies hidden?

Do you ever feel truth instead of or in addition to knowing it?

charleswood · October 14, 2013

One question to raise is "Who is the intended audience?" What is being expressed to whom?

That additional question broadens the meaning of negation: there is negation also in the sense that one photograph can present a single event as outstanding when it isn't 'out-standing' considering other facts and circumstances. What is or isn't outstanding is based on our cherished beliefs, at least in part.

For example, the Tiananmen Square photograph was not, according to an interview with a journalist who was there, the only such picture of the same subject that could have been taken: many people were obstructing tanks during those hours. Rugged individualism is a cherished belief in the United States. The capture and selection of one photograph of one dissident is a value judgment. The Tiananmen Square photograph was taken and editorially selected with an audience in mind.

A sole individual acting alone against all odds by standing up to a tank had high value in our culture here. Here we are biased by our own values. We place higher value on a lone dissident than on the coordinated workings of a group. For us, a group might be great, but Rambo type agency is for great praise. In some cultures, Rambo style agency is for shame. Admired agency is that which is accomplished within the tight confines of a group, despite collective values, but within collective values as opposed to show boating all alone, hard to see when in a culture where show boating is praised. But if you think Eric Burton without the Animals you get a sense of what I might mean.

So by what a photograph doesn't show we often find a point at which we can examine our own cherished cultural beliefs. I don't think we can do that without a broad understanding of history and of cultures. There is just no other way in my view to know what is hidden and what is on display in a photograph.

Negation, related to point of view, operates by the mechanics of subjective judgment. Our subjective judgment is operated most powerfully by our cherished beliefs, with or without our being aware of it.

michaellinder · October 14, 2013

Anders - "Absolute" truth does exist in science … that is, until a new paradigm is discovered and adopted. Then, it's back to the drawing board.

Fred - OK, so I'm a little hardheaded sometimes. I'm so accustomed to thinking about truth as an epistemological issue that I occasionally have difficulty looking at it from a broader perspective. Just as people can be gifted in many ways other than intellectual, so can truth exist for people in different modes.

Sign In

Truth

Recommended Posts

Top Posters In This Topic

Popular Days

Top Posters In This Topic

Popular Days

Posted Images

Create an account or sign in to comment

Create an account

Sign in