This New York Times article is a few days old, but it's a great, if rather long way of expounding upon an important topic.
In a nutshell, Errol Morris was taken with statements made by Susan Sontag about the British photographer Roger Fenton, commonly called the first war photographer for his work in the Crimean War.
Sontag recycled assertions made elsewhere that, for Fenton's two photographs of the 'valley of the shadow of death', one was 'original' and the other doctored. Morris, following his traditional method, tracked down the source of the assumptions calling one photo doctored and the other not, and proceeded to question how and why those assumptions were canonized.
Along the way it's amazing to see how learned scholars and 'thinkers' ignore or misconstrue readily perceptible physical evidence (in this case, the number of cannonballs and position of the sun) to make their own points.
http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007...one/index.html
Good luck getting through the nearly 800(!) comments.
In a nutshell, Errol Morris was taken with statements made by Susan Sontag about the British photographer Roger Fenton, commonly called the first war photographer for his work in the Crimean War.
Sontag recycled assertions made elsewhere that, for Fenton's two photographs of the 'valley of the shadow of death', one was 'original' and the other doctored. Morris, following his traditional method, tracked down the source of the assumptions calling one photo doctored and the other not, and proceeded to question how and why those assumptions were canonized.
Along the way it's amazing to see how learned scholars and 'thinkers' ignore or misconstrue readily perceptible physical evidence (in this case, the number of cannonballs and position of the sun) to make their own points.
http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007...one/index.html
Good luck getting through the nearly 800(!) comments.
