SUMMER 2021
August 28, 2020. © James Muriuki
The truth of photographic images has been challenged since the 19th century when the means for making them were invented. While the medium was embraced by the public at large, photographers grappled with the methods and techniques available to them, experimenting with technologies as they emerged and discovering the capacity of the medium to represent the world they experienced.
Photographs are inherently subjective in the ways in which they are made and perceived. There is no absolute truth in the photographic image. Photographers frame the reality that they see, whether the process is spontaneous or planned.
The truth of photography relies not only on the integrity of the image, but on its accessibility. If truth in image making is a commodity, how much is it worth, and how do we determine its value?
Photographs are inherently subjective in the ways in which they are made and perceived. There is no absolute truth in the photographic image. Photographers frame the reality that they see, whether the process is spontaneous or planned.
The truth of photography relies not only on the integrity of the image, but on its accessibility. If truth in image making is a commodity, how much is it worth, and how do we determine its value?
VIEWING TRUTH IN PHOTOGRAPHY
The exhibitions can be viewed in sequence or in whichever order the viewer chooses. Select a theme from the menu bar at the top of the page, or click one of the buttons below.
LOOKING FOR TRUTH IN A DIGITAL AGE
Truth in photography engenders new questions everyday. Not only as it relates to what we see in the news and social media, but in the photographs we make of family and friends. While personal photographs are usually appreciated and shared, they may also be dismissed or disregarded by people we don't know. We are reminded daily that anyone has the capacity to document events and people that can potentially shape our point of view on the world around us.
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In this installment of Looking for Truth in a Digital Age, we feature:
- US Dispatches from Magnum Foundation, locally-driven stories that spotlight diverse experiences of a year of unprecedented national crises
- James Muriuki's multi-angle look at construction workers in Nairobi
- Lisa Rathje's struggle to teach photography to inner-city youth who see The Photo as Snitch
- Marianne Nicolson's installations that incorporate photographs of her Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw First Nation community
US DISPATCHES
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THE TRANSMISSION OF PHOTOGRAPHIC TRUTH
Beginning in the 1880s, photographers began to not only make postcards, but stamps with gummed backs with specially designed cameras for taking direct photographs and copying C.D.V. portraits and cabinet cards. Photo postcards were collected and mailed, and by the early 1900s, with the invention or telephotograph machines (wire photo transmission), images could be sent instantly through a device that scanned and transmitted from an emitting machine to a receiving apparatus. In 1913 Édouard Belin introduced the “Berlinograph” that transmitted images over telephone lines, laying the groundwork for AT&T and Associated Press Wirephoto services.
14 Photograph Stamp Views, Beloit, Kansas, ca. 1900-1905
Real Photo Postcards
In 1903 the No. 3A Folding Pocket Kodak, designed for postcard-sized film, became available. With this camera, self-taught and trained photographers, were able to create images, often called real photo postcards, that had personal significance and commercial applications. Real photo postcards became expressions of family and community pride and were frequently sold at trade shows and fairs, on the street outside public buildings, and as souvenirs in local drugstores and stationery shops.
The truth of the real photo postcard was rooted in the people and places that were featured, from portraits of royalty, soldiers, and famous stage actors to children and adults of all ages, from important buildings and sites to landscapes and city skylines, from suffragette marches, parades, and political rallies to fires, floods, natural disasters, and lynching.
Real photo postcards opened opportunities not only for men, but also for women, whose prospects for self-employment during the early years of the 20th century were severely limited by the patriarchal society in which they lived and worked. Two such women, who successfully launched their careers through the production of real photo postcards, were Christina Broom and Lizzie Caswall Smith in the United Kingdom.
The truth of the real photo postcard was rooted in the people and places that were featured, from portraits of royalty, soldiers, and famous stage actors to children and adults of all ages, from important buildings and sites to landscapes and city skylines, from suffragette marches, parades, and political rallies to fires, floods, natural disasters, and lynching.
Real photo postcards opened opportunities not only for men, but also for women, whose prospects for self-employment during the early years of the 20th century were severely limited by the patriarchal society in which they lived and worked. Two such women, who successfully launched their careers through the production of real photo postcards, were Christina Broom and Lizzie Caswall Smith in the United Kingdom.
In today’s world, real photo postcards are more highly valued than postcards made through various other printing processes, even though the photographs, when digitized and disseminated through internet and social media are indistinguishable. Regardless of their mode of production, real photo postcards and their facsimiles, were, historically, intended to represent the truth in photography. Clearly, most real photocards are snapshots of a time and place, with framing that is largely intentional, though sometimes haphazard. The 1913 real photo postcard below would have little meaning were the context not stenciled on the image. The idea of the “real” is not synonymous with “truth,” and the identification of a photograph as “real” can ultimately be misleading, creating an ethical dilemma that compels us to rethink our preconceptions of the world around us.
Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. March 3, 1913. Crowd awaiting suffragette parade. Photograph by Frederick A. Schutz
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FINDING FAMILY
Family is both what we inherit and what we make. It is inherently the way we bind with one and another, whether it be with our relatives, or people we meet at a protest march or rally, or in a group of like-minded individuals. The truth in family is defined by relationships we perceive to be true.
