Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]

 There’s this crazy thinking that style guarantees truth. You go out with a hand-held camera, use available light, and somehow the truth emerges. 
 What is it that angers us?... We have been tricked. In essence, we have been lied to. The problem is not that the photograph has been manipulated, but that we have been manipulated by the photograph. 
 If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don’t need Photoshop. You don’t need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don’t need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption. 
 Photographs attract false beliefs the way flypaper attracts flies. 
 They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing. 
 All alone—shorn of context, without captions—a photograph is neither true nor false…. For truth, properly considered, is about the relationship between language and the world, not about photographs and the world. 
 With the advent of photography, images are torn free of the world, snatched from the fabric of reality, and enshrined as separate entities; they become more like dreams. It is no wonder that we really don’t know how to deal with them. 
 The issue of the truth or falsity of a photograph is only meaningful with respect to statements about the photograph. Truth or falsity “adheres” not to the photograph itself but to the statements we make about a photograph. 
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