Errol Morris On Photography

Sontag's Balls

"Not surprisingly many of the canonical images of early war photography turn out to have been staged, or to have had their subjects tampered with. After reaching the much shelled valley approaching Sebastopol in his horse-drawn darkroom, [Roger] Fenton made two exposures from the same tripod position: in the first version of the celebrated photo he was to call “The Valley of the Shadow of Death”(despite the title, it was not across this landscape, that the Light Brigade made its doomed charge), the cannonballs are thick on the ground to the left of the road, but before taking the second picture – the one that is always reproduced – he oversaw the scattering of the cannonballs on the road itself." Susan Sontag “Regarding the Pain of Others”

From this short bit of text, Errol Morris launched his own investigation, questioning what turned out to be no more than an assumption, borrowed by Sontag from Ulrich Keller, that the photo with the cannonballs in the road was staged. HERE

Accidental President, Accidental Presidential Photos

U.S. President George W. Bush (R) listens as White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card informs him of a second plane hitting the World Trade Center while Bush was conducting a reading seminar at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida September 11, 2001. Bush made a brief statement before leaving the school and immediately returned to Washington. (REUTERS/Win McNamee)

JIM BOURG: Photo-journalistically, it’s not a great photo. I talked to the photographer who shot it last night, and he was saying that at the time, not having any idea of the content of what was being whispered to the president, it seemed like a very inconsequential moment. And he almost didn’t take the picture as Card whispered to the president because you so often see the president’s aides whispering something to him off stage, or even on stage in a situation like that. And it didn’t seem significant at all. And yet in retrospect, it is perhaps the iconic moment of his presidency. It’s the reaction on his face as he listens to the news of the planes hitting the World Trade Center.



JIM BOURG: It’s all about the moment. There were plenty of photographers there. It’s an open press event at the White House. Any photographer with a White House pass can come and shoot the picture in the Rose Garden. So there’s a whole line of photographers and as far as I can tell, because this picture has gotten as much attention as it has, only our photographer, Kevin Lemarque, had the combination of exactly this moment and exactly this angle, which made it the most published photograph of the event and a photograph that is referred back to and published again and again many years later.




More on Presidential photos HERE