TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "truth"
About those 2005 and 2013 photos of the crowds in St. Peter’s Square
Post photojournalist Nick Kirkpatrick did a little digging and found that the lower photo… which features a sea of smartphones and tablets, was, indeed, taken during the announcement of Pope Francis’s election. But the top photo… which shows an audience with far fewer gadgets was taken during the funeral procession of Pope John Paul II — a very different mood and event type. There was no one addressing the crowd from the balcony, for example. So, the comparison isn’t quite accurate.
As Errol Morris says, to fake a photograph, you don’t need photoshop, all you have to do is change the caption.
But what’s sort of interesting is that the caption wasn’t totally misleading:
todayshow: How the world has changed: St. Peter’s Square in 2005 and 2013
It’s really the juxtaposition of the two images together into one image that does the “talking.” (As @ayjay put it, “ Never let the facts get in the way of a powerful photo juxtaposition.”) In cases like this, it’s really the “truthiness” of the juxtaposition that makes it spread so fast — it seems true, so we like it. In this way, it’s more like an editorial cartoon…
Stephen Tobolowsky, The Dangerous Animals Club
Fun read. Tobolowsky talked about the collection on NPR:
Where there’s truth, there’s life. … Aristotle talked about something called techne. … There is a little jolt that we get when we recognize the truth, and it gives us a little burst of pleasure. Aristotle said it is the basis of comedy and it is the basis of all drama, is trying to find techne. I think that’s helped me in my comedic acting, and it’s certainly helped me in writing my book, in that I have to have faith in what really happened, and I hope that techne is created in people’s brains as either they read or if they watch me on screen. … When we see truth in someone else’s story, we recognize it as part of a universal story.
Filed under: my reading year 2013
“Art is a lie that tells the truth.” With so many quotes attributed to Picasso, it’s hard to track down where they actually came from, or whether they were even said at all.
In 1923, Picasso talked about cubism with an American critic named Marius de Zayas. The discussion was translated (with his approval) and published as “Picasso Speaks,” in The Arts. What Picasso is really talking about is cubism, and how much he’s not into “research” when it comes to painting. Here’s part of it:
When I paint, my object is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for. In art intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish: love must be proved by facts and not by reasons. What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing.
We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. If he only shows in his work that he has searched, and re-searched, for the way to put over lies, he would never accomplish anything.
I get this thrill out of sayin’ what’s true
Anne Zbitnew, Untitled, 1995 (via defacedbook)
A question that haunts me a lot.
